


Tucker Foley and the Long Arc of the Paranormal Universe

by helpivefallenandicantgetup



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: AU, Body Horror, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Dysfunctional Family, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Hehehe, Horror, Humor, Murder Mystery, Mystery, Paranormal Mystery AU, Serial Killers, Some angst, Summoning, Summoning Circles, Tucker-centric, Vomiting, Witchcraft, a guy gets knifed, also made a lot of stuff up tho, before ANYTHING bad can happen, but i’ll put a warning on the chapter too, cuz he gets NO APPRECIATION, fun right? wrong, i did a decent amount of research into the occult for this, i mean a little bit it's not that bad, i want to be clear, implied danger of child molestation, in like the first chapter but it's chill, it does not happen, it is prevented, kid never even realizes they were in danger, my fbi agent is probably kinda freaked, of ghosts though not of vomit, so now he gets to be the protagonist and also psychic, so there's that, some violence, spoiler it's the Mansons, the foleys are a highly functional family, to be completely accurate it's a, very much so
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 12:55:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 55,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19441894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helpivefallenandicantgetup/pseuds/helpivefallenandicantgetup
Summary: Tucker is psychic and doesn't want to be, Sam is an occultist who doesn't believe in the occult, and the new kid is maybe-possibly-probably dead. And as if that weren't enough, there's a serial killer stalking Amity Park. Hold onto your berets, readers: this is going to be a weird one.





	1. Not a French Artist from the '30s

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even people who aren't psychic know that the bathroom in your local public library is one of the most sinister places you can go.

Not a French Artist from the ‘30s

 _or alternatively:_ First Impressionism

Tucker knew as soon as he woke up that today was not going to be his day.

At first he put it down to the splitting headache from staying up until 3 a.m. playing Black Ops XXIII. He smacked his phone screen to stop the alarm (set to the zen xylophone-ish thingy, which ceased to be soothing around the seventh time it woke him up) and rolled over to face the wall and doze for just a few more seconds…

Tucker knew when he woke up the second time that there was more to it than a headache brought on by his own lack of regard for his health and wellness. There was an itch in the clumps of tendon and the marrow of his bones, and it made him uneasy. Reluctantly, he rolled out of bed and landed carefully on the balls of his feet. His limbs didn’t feel like they belonged to him, and he found he suddenly hated the feeling of friction pulling at his skin. _Something’s coming._

He padded across the wooden floorboards toward the long, thin rectangle of light at the bottom of his window curtain. It picked out the reflective surfaces of his room in a sort of dreamlike, dusty blue. _Something’s close._ He wrapped his fingers gingerly around the cord– _something’s!_ –and suddenly pulled with all his might. The curtain _whirred_ upward with a noise like a chainsaw, drenching the room in bright morning sunlight, and Tucker stumbled back, blinking, the feeling dispelled and his limbs once more his own. Still awkward, too-long teenager limbs, but no longer floating or itching in the silence.

Tucker wondered why he was shaking.

He stared out the window for a minute at the sun-stained telephone pole and the five crows balanced on its crossbeams. Occasionally one would rustle its wings, and then another would object to being jostled and take a quick snap at it, and there would be a brief flurry of motion before all again went still, watching the sun. Tucker watched it with them until he could feel that the sweat had dried on his hairline.

Then he turned around to grab some clothes. God damn it, where was his beret?! Did his mom seriously expect him to wear a _normal hat?_ At least yesterday’s shirt passed the sniff test, so he had that going for him.

The rest of his morning routine went much the same way. At 9:27 he pounded down the stairs to find his mom, a short woman in her fifties with cropped hair and an easy smile, sitting at the kitchen island reading the newspaper. Light wooden cabinets protruded over the granite countertops at just about head height around the room, and in the center was the kitchen island, finished in the same dark granite with an inset white sink. He swept past toward the pantry with a quick “Morning!”

“Morning, baby, you’ve got toothpaste on your cheek,” she responded without looking up. How did she even know? Her mom instincts were truly terrifying. He swiped at his cheek with one hand (ineffectually, as a look in the mirror would tell him later) as he snatched the cereal box out of the pantry with the other and dumped about half of it into a bowl.

Tucker’s dad strode in as he was halfway through a gigantic, milk-sodden bite and raised one skeptical eyebrow. “Where does it all go? That’s enough cereal for two hollow legs and an arm, Tuck.”

“Two words: growth spurt.” Tucker grinned around his bite of cereal.

“Aren’t you getting a little old for that, buddy?”

Tucker glared at him as he chewed the last of his bite. “I’m about to hit a growth spurt that will have _all_ the ladies swooning over me. Aaany minute now, just you watch.”

The corners of Mr. Foley’s mouth twitched upwards. “Oh, we’re watching. Right now I’m watching you eat a borderline blasphemous amount of Lucky Charms. The chemicals in that stuff are more likely to stunt your growth than anything.”

“I’ll eat a salad for lunch or something.”

His mom, whom he’d all but forgotten, laughed from behind the newspaper. “Sure you will.”

“Hey, whose side are you on?!” Tucker took another indignant bite.

She folded down the paper so just her eyes were showing and gave him a deadpan look. “I’ve spent the last fifteen years trying every trick in the book to get you to _look_ at a vegetable; whose side do you _think_ I’m on?”

Damn, he was outnumbered. They won this round. It _was_ extremely unlikely that he was going to eat a salad for lunch. He lapsed into half-serious sullen silence as he plowed through the remainder of his Lucky Charms and his dad headed upstairs to grab his suitcase.

Tucker’s dad was an associate at a law firm that had first grown in Chicago and then begun to slowly but surely crop up in the surrounding cities and counties of Illinois. Amity was decent-sized, so the offices here took up a few floors of the tallest building in the business district, and the commute from the suburbs was an easy twenty minutes by car. That was also convenient for his mom’s job as restaurant manager at Amity’s hippest new hipster eatery (not restaurant–that wouldn’t be hipster enough), Nagual’s on 7th. Maurice Foley was a lean man in his fifties with a hairline just beginning to recede but a full goatee still going strong. He wore slightly outdated suits not because he couldn’t afford new ones but because Tucker’s mom, Angela, was the only one in the family with any sense of style (which was also why she kept trying to get rid of Tucker’s beret in various creatively sneaky ways).

He had almost finished his bowl and was fishing out the last of the marshmallows so he could slurp the rest when his mom looked up again. “Oh, Tucker, you remember you’re supposed to help Tristan with his project today, right? Something about photography?”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m up before noon on a Saturday.” He gave her a quick hug around her shoulders from the back before heading toward the stairs. “Love you!”

“Love you, too,” she called back absently, already returning to the paper.

That is, until he stopped at the foot of the stairway. “Hey, mom? You wouldn’t happen to have seen my beret anywhere, right?”

Mrs. Foley’s voice was very deliberately casual from behind the paper. “Can’t say I have. Looks like you’ll have to go out without it. The horror!”

Tucker crossed his arms and employed his best (very manly) pout. _“Mommm….”_

She set down her paper with an exasperated sigh. “You’re always saying you want girls to like you, and then you wear a _beret_ 24/7! You are not a French artist from the ‘30s, Tucker.”

“I _like_ the beret.”

“You also like all-nighter video game sessions, even though _you’re_ the one who claims it makes your brain feel like feta cheese the next day.”

“Can I please have my beret?”

She sighed again and cast her eyes heavenward. “It’s in the laundry room.”

“Thanks, mom!” Tucker shot her his best roguish grin and jogged down the hallway. He swept back through the kitchen on his way to the door, but this time she didn’t have a perky farewell for him; she’d set the newspaper on the table and was leaning down close to it, brow furrowed in consternation. “Tucker, honey,” she asked, “do you know a girl named Amber McClain?”

Tucker thought about it. It sounded familiar, but…. “Nope. Why, who is she?” But his mom just waved him off, eyes sliding intently down the page. Tucker shrugged and pulled on his beret.

Now properly uniformed and armored against the day, he headed out the door just in time to beg a ride into town from his dad. In the car, he checked his texts: two pictures of him making weird faces in middle school from Sam, a notification from his own specially coded calendar app that his science lab was due Tuesday, and one from his cousin Tristan asking if Tucker could bring his heavy-duty filming gear. Luckily, he’d assumed it would be needed and packed accordingly.

His dad dropped him off in the parking lot of Amity Park’s main park (heh), and he pushed through the slightly rusty metal gate to find Tristan and his senior friends already waiting for him. Tristan was a tall kid, with lighter skin than Tucker but the same honey-brown eyes and strong nose Tucker’s mom shared with her sister. “Tuck!” he called from the nearest weathered wooden table, where he was arranging a variety of props that seemed to include a polyester toga, a bunch of plastic breastplates, and a surprisingly realistic-looking trident. “Did you bring a tripod?”

“Yeah, dude, I got it.” Tucker wrinkled his nose at the objects on the table. “What’s this play about again?”

“We’re supposed to adapt a piece of classic literature or theater into the modern vernacular, and try to apply a modern theme,” spoke up a blonde girl voice, breaking out of the conversation she’d been having with the other two seniors. “We’re doing _Agamemnon_ by Aeschylus.”

Tucker struggled for anything witty to say about a Greek play he knew nothing about, but by the time he’d thought of something besides “Cool” she’d already turned back to her friends, who were now arguing with Tristan about which “guard” would get to use the trident and which one would be stuck with the boring yet historically accurate sword. Tucker started pulling the legs of his tripod to full length in silence. _What did you expect, they’re seniors._

Amity Park Park (it was actually named after some old rich dude, but that was how Tucker liked to think about it) was a broad expanse of mostly yellowing grass abutted by a shady treed area, some fenced-in tennis courts, and a tiny library. The library looked very _Brady Bunch_ -era with its beige brick walls and low, boxy ‘70s architecture. Tucker wasn’t a great reader and hadn’t gone in since he was a little kid, but Sam assured him he wasn’t missing much in terms of variety. Scattered around the park were weathered tables with twin benches like the ones Tristan’s group was sitting on right then. The lack of buildings seemed like a problem to Tucker, but when he asked, the blonde girl told him they’d film the indoor scenes at the courthouse a few minutes away (it had columns) and then went back to loudly arguing about the historical accuracy of plastic weapons.

Things got increasingly awkward as time went on; after that first stumble Tucker’s tongue kept tying itself in knots, and he felt increasingly self-conscious. The only person he really knew here was his cousin, and Tristan was busy planning with the others. At least no one was really talking to him, but he kind of hoped they’d stop planning and start _acting_ so he could do something other than fiddle around with his already-prepped equipment. He drifted over to the water fountain and was just considering re-downloading Instagram (despite his tendency to lose track of time and spend hours going through memes on Explore) when Tristan clapped his hands. “Alright, guys, let’s get going! Tuck, is everything ready?” Tucker gave him two thumbs up.

The next two hours were a lot more fun. Tristan had a lot of interesting ideas for camera angles, and the Latina girl playing Clytemnestra was actually really good. They were halfway through the final scene (“But Iphigenia’s never coming back, and for that I could never give you the death you deserve, not if I had a thousand more knives and you a thousand more breaths to suffer through. So I didn’t do this for revenge. I did it because she deserved a better world than the one she got. A world without you”) when Tristan, his character having just died offscreen, sneezed loudly from behind the camera. Clytemnestra giggled and then quickly tried to cover it with a wild, expansive gesture of one bloodsoaked hand, only to accidentally smear red food coloring on the nose of her co-conspirator and boyfriend, “Aegisthus.” Tristan yelled, “Cut!” and everyone groaned.

“Once more from the top?” questioned the blonde girl (Tucker hadn’t actually caught her name, so he was just thinking of her as her character, Cassandra). “I’m down to redo my monologue, but I still think Tristan and I should die on-screen. We’ve got more than enough ketchup.”

“But we don’t have retractable knives, and anyway it’s not in the actual play! I don’t want to get marked down, we talked about this,” complained “Aegisthus.”

“But what better way to contrast Cassandra’s impotence with Clytemnestra’s agency outside of the moral system?”

“Jesus, Caeley, it’s a high school project. We’re not submitting this to the Cannes Film Festival.”

Tristan sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Alright, you guys can fight this out again if you want. I’m going to the bathroom.” He turned and started to walk toward the library, which was about fifteen yards away.

Tremors exploded across Tucker’s skin. All of a sudden he was shaking and short of breath and cold even in the heat of a hot September afternoon. The itch was back in his joints, but ten times worse, and all he could do was stare at Tristan’s retreating back with his heart in his stomach and his throat at the same time. _Something’s coming. Now._ Tristan pulled open the door of the library, the bell over the door somehow managing to tinkle loud enough across the whole park to overpower the bickering behind him, and Tristan paused, door open in his hand, for a long few seconds. One hand clutched absently at his chest. _Don’t go in there, don’t go in there, don’t go–_

Tristan marched purposefully into the library.

Tucker’s tremors subsided enough that he could catch his breath, but he was sweating buckets, and he couldn’t look away. The deep feeling of unease in his chest only grew stronger, making him queasy. And Tucker knew something bad was about to happen.

Not just as an instinctive thing, though. Not like “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Intellectually, based on precedent, based on so many little past incidents and big ones, Tucker knew to trust his hunches. But he tried _so hard_ not to think about them and it had been so long that he’d almost been able to dismiss it this morning, almost been able to convince himself this nameless _thing_ was something he’d outgrown–

And he should go to the library, but he was freaking out because he also knew he wouldn’t like what he found, but he didn’t know what it would be, and that was _terrifying._ And he thought of all the times he’d had a bad feeling about a place or a stranger and ignored it, and how if anything bad had happened he’d never found out, so he could almost convince himself nothing had happened at all–

And he thought of his aunt and uncle, Tristan’s mom and dad. Then he mumbled something to the rest of the group and took off running toward the library.

The librarian looked up in surprise from the book she was stamping for a little girl when he threw open the glass door. The bell pealed almost reproachfully, the high pitches piercing through the tight knot in his chest, and he made a beeline for the checkout desk. “Miss? Where’s the bathroom?”

She laughed–the mystery of his entrance solved–and leaned over the desk to point in and to the left. “Right back there, through the nonf–” He was gone before she could finish her sentence.

Tucker sprinted past rows of shelves, not even noticing the two little girls on a high ladder or the shifty-looking man with a ponytail who turned around, startled, as he pounded by. _Something is–someone is–!_ By now he was breathing hard for normal reasons: Tucker was really out of shape. He started to lag, but then a faint thud from the bathroom had him redoubling his speed. He threw open the door and stopped short, almost tripping over _oh holy fuuu–_

Tristan was sprawled across the dirty tile floor, muttering something. There was blood on his head and on the door of one of the stalls, and his shirt looked dark and sticky and there was something sticking _out of it._ There were grainy red smears across half of the bathroom. Someone in a hoodie was dragging him through another door on the other side of the room, ten feet away—and the door behind Tucker had just swung shut.

The person’s head snapped up, showing Tucker a cheap plastic mask. The fluorescent lights flickered and went out. Tucker grabbed behind him for the door handle with sweaty hands and tried to yell, but his voice wouldn’t work. Tristan made a noise–was that Tristan? He turned to the door, but it still _wouldn’t open–_ and he felt movement behind him and he yanked at the door handle with his entire body and _SOMETHING WAS COMING_ and he _screamed._

A heavy weight thudded against his back, and he was dragged down, banging his shoulder on the door as he kicked and fought frantically to get away from whatever had its arms around him. Then there was a hand on his mouth and he _bit_ and the weight was off of him with a cry of pain. He wrenched himself off the floor and threw himself back onto the door handle. Behind him he heard a door open and shut, just as he got his own door open and fell into the bookshelf opposite before scrambling up to his feet again, back against the bookshelf, eyes locked on the open door of the bathroom. His heart was going to beat out of his chest.

The bathroom was empty.

Well, no, Tristan was there, laying on the ground, and the ground was red, and the grout between the tiles was never going to be unpleasantly greyish-white again because the stains would never come out. But the other door (maintenance closet, his brain supplied helpfully) swung shut again, and the bathroom was empty.

The man with the ponytail and the two little girls were staring at him with wide eyes from the end of the aisle. The librarian was sprinting toward them. “Oh my god, are you okay?” One of the little girls started crying, and with a start Tucker realized he was, too. He was sobbing. Slowly, he slid down to the ground, feeling the wood shelves _bump, bump, bump_ against his spine.

He looked again at Tristan, bleeding on the floor, and he knew he should check on him, but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t go back in that bathroom.

Instead, he turned to the librarian, slowly, fighting through a bone-deep exhaustion like he’d never felt before. “Call 911.”

~(*0*)~

Tristan was awake when they bundled him into the ambulance, head lolling to the side and mouth muttering things that Tucker couldn’t understand until the EMTs finally strapped the oxygen mask on. Three hours and a trauma blanket later, the policeman with the short red beard allowed Tucker to leave with his parents, though not before making sure to obtain a phone number in case the police needed a follow-up statement. Tucker’s parents hugged him for a full two minutes in total, and they had an early dinner at his favorite restaurant, Steak Your Life on It, on the way home. Somehow everything tasted bland. He just wanted to go to sleep.

Before she would let him go upstairs, though, his mom took him through to the right and sat him down at the dining room table. The dining room’s blue walls looked almost a sickly brown in the orange-yellow light of the small iron chandelier that lit the room. Two of his dad’s amateur paintings on the walls showed leafy outdoor scenes, and Tucker found himself distracted by the way the lights also reflected in the polished mahogany of the table, turning the table into a stagnant pond and the dining room as a whole into a murky swamp lit by fireflies. Angela Foley looked him in the eye. “Tucker. I know you’re going to be very careful from now on, and I’m sorry for how you had to learn, but your dad and I think it’s best you understand everything. Did you hear about Mrs. Ainara? Her son Kwan is in your class.”

Tucker, who had been sort of staring at the ground next to her, looked up and made eye contact at that. “Yeah, we had a memorial assembly last week. Second day of school.”

“What I doubt they told you, and since you don’t read the newspaper what you might not know, is they think she was murdered by someone who was already responsible for two other deaths in Chicago. And last month they found the body of a girl who used to go to your school, Amber McClain, within Amity city limits. They’re still investigating.”

Tucker’s eyes widened. “So I–was that…?”

“No. Look at me. We don’t know anything right now, but the police are inclined to investigate in that direction as well as all the others. So if some of their questions seemed weird, that was why.”

Tucker started. “They...they asked me if Tristan had ever been to Chicago. I didn’t know.”

“Right. So we don’t know anything right now, but–and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this–you need to be _very careful_ from now on. Anywhere you go, I want you to bring a friend. If you’re sleeping over at Sam’s house, make sure her parents will be there as well, and if they’re going out of town offer to let her stay with us. And if you see anyone weird or suspicious around the school or really _anywhere,_ you call the police and let them know. Got it?”

Tucker nodded. His mom regarded him sternly for another moment, and then her face broke and she pulled him into a tight hug. “Whoever it is, they’re going to catch him soon. Okay, baby? You’re safe with us. You’re safe.” He nodded into her shoulder, eyes finally dry.

But if he really paid attention, the feeling was still there. Like a mosquito buzzing just out of hearing range, like knowing there’s something crawling across your skin even though you can’t actually feel it. And with a start, he realized he’d felt it before, that this was something he could classify based on past experiences and the ache of hard-won instinct in the back of his skull, based on the crawling sensation that had plagued him in the weeks before Mikey Sullivan’s dad was diagnosed with cancer and the memory of some several-celled organism that saw a dot in the sky 66 million years ago and for the first time understood the true meaning of death from above.

Something was still coming. In fact, something had just begun.

~(*0*)~

Tucker woke up from a turbulent sleep at noon on Sunday, then stayed in bed and played video games for the rest of the day. He ate a lot of chips, and his mom kept bringing things like apple sticks with peanut butter and pizza pockets for variety. It was a good move. By the end of the day, he’d managed to spend a few hours forgetting, not thinking about it at all. He was also bored out of his mind, bored enough to actually _willingly_ finish the rest of his homework besides CompSci (he’d finished that Friday since it was actually _interesting,_ even if the pace of the class was a little slow). By 10:00 he’d realized something surprising: He wanted to go to school the next day.

His mom was exceedingly shocked at this declaration, mostly because he’d never before in his life expressed an actual desire to go to school the next day. Quite the opposite, actually. But Tucker was bored, and there was only so long one could subsist on pizza pockets and peanut butter.

(And if his skin was still itching when he sat still for too long...well, he wouldn’t have been able to put it into words if he’d tried. The concept didn’t really translate into English. He wondered if there was some perfect word out there, if a few hundred hours and a Duolingo account would allow him to define and categorize the feeling of _wrong_ in his chest and the backs of his nostrils. He suspected not.)

The next morning he got up in the usual way, with only a vague feeling like cat’s paws running down his back. He brushed his teeth in the usual way, he had a slight pounding behind his eyes but no headache, and he didn’t flinch at small noises or anything like that. His nervous system had settled down, as much as it ever did. And that, somewhat ironically, was making him nervous.

He caught the bus to school and sat with a vague sort-of friend, occasionally making conversation but mostly scrolling through memes on Reddit. The bus had a funky smell to it, like the unholy lovechild of Axe body spray and the fungal cultures in AP Biology classroom, which contributed to his desire to keep his mouth shut for the duration of the ride.

So Tucker didn’t really talk to anyone until he got to first period, where Sam glommed onto his wrist like a starfish with a wild look in her eyes. _“Tucker!_ Why the hell didn’t you answer my texts?! I heard something happened at the library, and then my parents heard from Mrs. Rodriguez that your cousin got hurt, and then we didn’t know what was happening and you could’ve been hit by a truck or something and I—”

“Woah, Sam, calm down! I’m okay.” He subtly tried to pry her hand off his wrist and failed, which was a bit humiliating because his gaming fingers were really the only muscles that he exercised regularly and strenuously. “And they think Tristan’s going to be okay too. I’ll tell you what happened at lunch; I don’t want to” —he side-eyed the rapidly filling classroom— “make a big deal out of it.”

Sam gave him an assessing glance. He tried for a smile and added, “Plus, showing this much emotion in public is not your style. You’re going to ruin your rep.”

Sam _hmph_ ed and slid into her seat. Tucker did the same, wincing when his bruised hip from hitting the bathroom floor banged into the metal bar attaching the desk to the chair. A few idle conversations fluttered through the air around them, and Tucker just as idly tuned in. Certain voices, mostly the A-listers since to a man they all talked unnecessarily loudly, popped out and then faded back like he was switching between distant, staticky radio stations. “—4th of July? That was _insane_ dude I don’t even rem—” “Yeah, his name’s Josh and he’s super sweet, I—” “—do the reading last week, it was a total waste of—”

Mr. Lancer strode into the classroom five minutes late and everyone immediately quieted down. Baldness, literary swearing, and conspicuous gut notwithstanding, Lancer was a good teacher and an intimidating one. You could tell he enjoyed his power by the faint smirk that drifted across his face when silence fell.

He gave the room one imperious survey as he walked to his desk and then gestured impatiently to someone standing just outside the door. A skinny, pale teenager with black hair took a few reluctant steps into the classroom and stood to the side of the desk. He looked like a normal high schooler besides the huge backpack, which made him look like a snail who was also an apocalypse prepper.

Tucker’s skin immediately tried to _crawl_ off of him.

Sam gave him a weird look, and he realized his breathing had gone funky. He consciously controlled it and looked back at the the new kid, whom Mr. Lancer had just introduced as Denny Feldman or something, from Chicago. The new kid hooked his thumbs behind his backpack straps and scanned the room nervously. Was nervously really the right word? No, _warily._ That was it.

Tucker’s goosebumps revolted one more time, pointedly, and then the _feeling_ settled down to a dull hum in his capillaries. But as the new kid hiked to an open seat at the back of the room, Tucker still couldn’t keep his thought from earlier from ricocheting around his mind with even greater urgency.

Something had begun, and the _something_ that had been coming? It was already here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> have I got a mystery for you ;)  
> Secondary note: I’ve never read agamemnon by aeschylus, but the wikipedia page was super interesting lol


	2. Three Conversations in the Calm Before the Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tucker talks to Sam, Sam talks to her dad, Tucker talks to Tristan, and then Tucker complains to his empty room.

Three Conversations in the Calm Before the Storm

_or alternatively:_ The Universe Could Use LinkedIn

“It was horrible, Sam. I’ve never been that afraid in my life. I keep seeing guys in hoodies and swallowing my lungs a little bit.”

Sam hugged his shoulders a little tighter, resting her cheek on the left one. They were sitting at the end of the bleachers farthest from the school, on the second row from the top. A few other small groups sat on the bleachers eating lunch, but none were close enough to overhear. “I’m so sorry that happened,” Sam said lowly. Tucker glanced at her and was a bit surprised at what he saw. She didn’t look sympathetic or scared so much as _angry._

Well, actually, this was Sam, so he didn’t know what he’d expected.

Sam squeezed one more time and then let go to start arranging her lunch tray. (Three iceberg lettuce leaves, chips, and a muffin—the cafeteria really could afford to improve its vegetarian options.) “I hate to say this, but...is there any possibility he could come back? For you, I mean.” Her furtive glance at him looked nervous this time, as if she were afraid she’d overstepped, but it was a valid question.

“I found out this morning that the police sent a car to sit outside my house late last night. My dad talked to them, and they don’t think it’s likely, but they’re going to keep the car out there for a week or so just in case, and then my dad has a cousin who’s a cop who’s going to come stay with us for a while. With a gun and stuff. So that’s...nice, I guess. 24/7 police detail. Tons of fun.”

Sam sighed in relief like one of her mom’s heavy designer purses had been dropped on her chest. She picked at a lettuce leaf. “Good. I’d like to keep you around for a little while at least.” She paused. “So, I guess...what now?”

“Uh...what do you mean?”

Sam took a big bite of muffin and then tried to talk around it. “I meungh, luff, wha—?” She gestured expansively with the hand holding the muffin, and Tucker snorted into his boiled chicken while she huffed in frustration at her inability to articulate exactly what she was trying to say. “Whuh do you do nowfgh, whuth thuh cashe?” She swallowed. “With the case. Are you going to have to testify again or something?” she tacked on almost as an afterthought.

“I mean, maybe? They have our number. And my parents want me to visit Tristan tomorrow. But other than that, I guess just wait for the police to solve it and stuff.”

Sam frowned. “I can’t believe they haven’t caught this asshole yet. I mean, Chicago PD is on this. _Chicago._ If they couldn’t solve it after three people died in their own city, I don’t know if Amity PD really stands a chance.”

“I dunno, Chicago PD is more overworked than Florida—” Tucker paused, letting his mind catch up with him. “Wait, three people in Chicago?”

“Yeah. Well, sort of. I looked into the case after...you know, Kwan’s mom”–she looked away guiltily, the way people do when something incomprehensible happens to someone else–“and there’s a third case that they’re on the fence about attributing to this guy. Software engineer in the ‘burbs named Nicholas something. His case didn’t have the same ‘characteristics’ as the others, whatever that means—lot of journalists are pretty sure he had different wounds than the other two in Chicago—but the chief of police announced that they did find evidence of a connection in his house.”

“Huh.” Tucker took another thoughtful bite of his chicken and bacon-sprinkled mashed potatoes and chewed slowly. They lapsed into silence. The bleachers creaked under them as a cool autumn wind rustled the painted white lines in the grass of the football field and whistled between the twin prongs of the field goal. For a second, the prongs reminded Tucker of horns, which reminded him of the other thing he’d wanted to tell Sam about, the thing he’d been dying to tell the only person he could ever since his close call. “There was one more thing, though, about the library.”

Sam looked up with concern and lettuce between her teeth. “What is it?”

“Look, I know how you feel about this stuff, but...you remember how when we were kids I would get those, like, _feelings?”_

“Dude, eight puberty jokes literally just flashed before my eyes.”

“Yeah, okay, me too, but that’s _not_ the point. I mean, like, the _weird_ feelings. The _creepy_ ones.”

Sam raised one eyebrow. “You’re not making this any better, just a lot more vaguely worrying.”

Tucker snorted, then caught himself. “Ok, but you _know_ what I _mean,_ dude.”

Sam’s slight smile drooped, and she crossed her arms, looking uncomfortable. “Yeah, I know what you mean. And you know what I think, so do we _have_ to have this conversation?”

“But dude, I _got_ it again that day. Stronger than it’s ever been. That’s how I knew to follow Tristan into the bathroom.”

Sam snorted and then tried to hide it behind a cough. Tucker stared at her. “What?”

“It’s nothing, go on.”

“Wait, I want to hear what you were thinking.”

“No, seriously, it’s super insensitive and I feel guilty! Don’t make me say it, Tuck!”

As a matter of historical importance, it was extremely hard for Tucker and Sam to maintain a serious conversation. “Okay, but now I _have_ to know.”

“Aughhh, fine! Just, your weird, creepy feeling prompted you to follow your cousin into the bathroom?”

Tucker stared at her for a second, then burst into that kind of wheezing, scandalized laughter you get when you really shouldn’t be laughing at something but you can’t _stop_ . He punched her. Between wheezes he whisper-yelled, “Sam, what the _hell?_ I don’t want that in my brain; why would you even _think_ that?!”

“My sense of humor is 100% your fault and you know it. I was so pure before you corrupted me.”

“Please, that degree of nasty can’t be _learned_.”

Sam let him stop chuckling before re-broaching the subject. “Ok, but that aside, I thought you stopped having these in, like, eighth grade.”

Tucker shifted uncomfortably. “Nah, I just kind of stopped talking about them. I knew how you felt about, like...stuff.”

She cringed. “You know I believe you about the feelings, Tuck! I think it’s totally possible the human subconscious can pick up on danger signs the conscious mind can’t. It’s the other part that I can’t get behind.”

“Ok, well, the Tristan thing was just a regular vanilla _feeling_. If vanilla tasted like nightmares. But do you remember when Lancer introduced that new kid?”

“Yeah, Danny something. You looked like you were tweaking,” Sam said warily. She munched on a chip and offered him one. He waved her off, which made her _somewhat worried_ face gear-shift into _exceedingly concerned._

“Yeah, well, he also gave me a vibe. But not, like, a _danger_ vibe, just a _wrong_ vibe. A _lunch lady_ vibe.”

“Tucker….”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I just...you were a little kid. And the afterlife and the paranormal, they’re not _real_ , Tucker. They can’t be. Dead is dead.”

“But if it’s _not—”_ Tucker cut himself off. “Okay, fine, but you believe the subconscious thing, and Dennis Whatever gave me a seriously weird feeling.”

They both paused. “Wait,” Sam said slowly, “...didn’t Lancer say he was from Chicago?”

“...Yep.” He popped the _‘p.’_ His eyes were wide.

Sam sat up straight, eyes flicking once around the field. “But it _couldn’t_ be him, right? I mean, he’s our age!”

“The guy in the bathroom definitely seemed taller.” Tucker shuddered. “I think? It was dark, though, and it happened really fast. But you’re right, though, there’s no way….”

“Yeah, of course, yeah!” Sam laughed nervously. The bell sounded in the distance, and she started picking up her trash and putting it on the tray in hurried, jerky movements. “That would be ridiculous.”

“Totally. Completely ridiculous.”

They avoided each other’s eyes the whole way across the field.

~(*0*)~

Sam couldn’t forget about the conversation for the rest of the school day. Three p.m. found her waiting outside the school and replaying it again and again in her mind, the way she used to replay various Black Veil Brides songs during her gothier phase (she had toned down the goth about halfway through sophomore year). Usually at this time she would be going somewhere with Tucker or a more peripheral friend, but today her dad had said he would pick her up from school, what with the two actual murders and one attempted murder that had occurred in the last month or so in normally tranquil Amity Park. And _Jeremy Manson_ picking his _daughter_ up from _school?_ Sam had accepted the offer mainly to either witness the highly improbable or call his bluff.

It was looking like the latter as Sam’s digital watch blinked its cheerful neon way toward 3:30. She was good and steamed both figuratively and literally (once the wind had died down it’d quickly become a _hot_ September afternoon, and the front of the school provided little cover for Sam’s sensitive vampire-esque skin tone) when a (not _the,_ _a)_ family Mercedes carefully signaled and pulled up a tidy seven inches from the curb where Sam was standing. Jeremy Manson opened the passenger window and leaned across from the driver’s seat toward Sam. He looked utterly unruffled. “Samantha, sorry I’m late. Last-minute problems at work. Do you want to drive?”

Did Sam want to drive? She was still learning, so she needed the practice, and it would give her an excuse to avoid the conversation. But if she agreed, she would be supporting through passivity the way he’d redirected the conversation to completely pass over the fact that he’d left his daughter standing alone in front of the school for 27 minutes with a serial killer on the loose. Sam fixed him with cold eyes. “I’ll pass this time, if you don’t mind.”

Something in Jeremy Manson’s face seemed to fall, or maybe crack a little and flake away, but he was still smiling when he answered “Suit yourself” and unlocked the passenger door. Sam scanned quickly to make sure no one saw her climbing into the sleek blue Mercedes. As she sat down, she caught her dad running one fumbling hand through his platinum blonde hair, mussing it up just a bit at the back so that it stood up the wrong way against the (stylish and completely vegan-unfriendly) leather-and-chrome headrest. So maybe not so utterly unruffled.

The keychains on her backpack jingled as she played with them, not looking at her dad. The black backpack on her lap turned the car into a mountainous environment, and the atmosphere between them helped complete the illusion: it felt prickly with phantom pine needles. Mr. Manson signaled a left turn, completed it in silence, and then side-eyed Sam once he was on a straightaway. “So, Samantha. How was school?”

Sam shrugged. “Fine. Average.”

“And your friend Tucker? Is he okay?”

She snuck a glance at him over the Mountain of Zippers and Sorrow, but his eyes were firmly on the road. It was impressive that he’d heard about what happened to Tucker and remembered it, even if it was weird how he still referred to him as “your friend Tucker” despite having had him over for dinner many, many times over the course of quite literally years. They only knew one Tucker! No one knew more than one Tucker. “Yeah, he’s, he’s good. Seemed okay at school today.”

“He came to school? Good for him.”

“Yeah, I thought so, too.”

“Mhm.”

The conversation wheezed out one last breath and keeled over on the side of the road. Mr. Manson checked for it in his rear view mirror, then apparently decided to leave it for dead. Sam went back to jingling her keychains.

It was another good five minutes of trekking through the suburban jungle before they spoke again. “So, Samantha, I was thinking.” He paused, and Sam waited for him to go on before another slightly frazzled glance at her in the rear view mirror revealed he expected prompting. She mustered a “what?” at the same time he gave up on her and started in with “Remember whe—sorry.”

“No, go on. What were you thinking?”

Jeremy Manson breathed in and watched the windshield more determinedly. “Remember when you were little and you took ice skating lessons?”

She snorted, but not mean-spiritedly. That was a good memory. “Yeah, what about it?”

“How would you want to go ice skating weekend after next? We can get dinner in the mall and then you can show your dad some moves.”

Now _Sam_ was the one who found herself frazzled. She looked out the window and ran one hand through her hair, pulling a few strands out of the usual half-up black ponytail. “Uhh, you have time?”

“I should be able to get out early Sunday. Maybe seven or so?”

Okay, _woah._ Jeremy Manson had free time? His time was money; it was most certainly never free.

Another important thing to consider: It would be awkward as _hell._ They barely spent time together as it was, and this car ride was a shining example of how it usually went.

She needed a buffer. “Can I bring Tucker?”

Mr. Manson stared straight ahead, tapping a steady rhythm with his thumbs on the (vegan-unfriendly!) steering wheel. “Well, I thought it would be fun if it were just us. Like when you were little.” He checked both side mirrors without catching her eyes.

And that was when she grasped the full deviousness of his plan. The absolute _asshole!_ It wasn’t just that he was pretending nothing had ever gone wrong between them and he could just pick up where he left off, the way her parents always did after arguments—the way she _hated._ No, this was more than that. He was going to take away her ammunition. He was going to free up two hours for her, and then whenever they got into their next screaming fight where they tried to control every aspect of her life and she pointed out that they were barely even _in_ her life otherwise, they would point out this one day. Where they went ice skating. As if that had fixed everything and they had ice skated right back up to the moral high ground. _Well, tough break, Jeremy: You can’t even skate, much less skate uphill._

Sam white-knuckled her sharpest-edged keychain and plastered on a patented Manson smile. “Sorry, I just remembered! I’m busy all that weekend, huge project and stuff, you know how it is.” She stared him full in the eyes. “How about the next one?”

He looked away. “I’m not sure. I can try, but you know how things come up.” His eyes pleaded with her in the dusty side mirror.

Sam drew in breath to say something snarky and accusatory that would inevitably lead to a fight–and something caught her eye out the window.

They were driving past Masters Park and its associated library. The squat building’s roof had an overhang that, with the sun overhead, drenched the walls in heavy shadow. A “closed” sign was visible in the darkened glass door, and left-behind police tape fluttered and writhed in the breeze as the library slowly slid out of view behind the car. Funny how a bit of context could give an unassuming building such an aura of menace.

Tucker had almost died on Saturday. He could have died, just like that, if the attacker’d had, say, another knife or a few more seconds. That was a _legitimate possibility_. And the killer was still at large.

Sam thought of Grandma Ida.

Sam’s grandma had lived with them for nearly all of Sam’s childhood. When Sam had come down with the flu in the middle of the night and been sick on the bathroom floor, it had been Grandma Ida she’d woken up to deal with the mess. When she’d brought home her report cards, it had been Grandma Ida who’d read over the comments with her on the big squashy beige couch, and Grandma Ida had played heavy metal on the radio as she drove Sam to soccer practice in fifth grade, then Frank Sinatra when she picked her up later. Sam’s most vivid childhood memory was of falling into those white _pleather_ seats and staring up through the sunroof at the moths playing in the golden streetlights as Grandma Ida’s husky voice sang the wrong lyrics to “Fly Me to the Moon.”

Grandma Ida had passed away when Sam was in seventh grade. She’d been very old.

That had been the start of Sam’s occult phase. She’d always casually thought it was cool, she’d watched _Ghost Whisperer_ and _Supernatural_ and a lot of k-dramas of a similar nature, but she’d never thought much about whether she _believed_ in ghosts. That year she researched for hours a day. Her grades slacked off. She started wearing all black and didn’t stop. She tried everything she could and more, and her parents got tired of cleaning up candle wax and various odd-smelling herbs from her room and sweeping salt out the window. When they found the scars across her palms from dripping blood on the floorboards under the rug, they put a stop to it, or at least to her more obviously ritualistic eBay purchases.

But by then, they barely needed to do anything. It’d been a full year and she’d gotten zip, zilch, nada from the spirit world. Either the afterlife didn’t exist or the Beyond just didn’t have time to waste on a spoiled little rich girl. The former was easier to stomach, if only slightly—so that was what she chose to believe.

But that was three years ago; Sam wasn’t even thinking about that now. She just thought of Grandma Ida, and how wrecked she would have been if the last words they exchanged hadn’t been “I love you.”

She slowly let go of her keychain, feeling the suction as the metal unstuck from the grooves of her sweaty palms. She looked out through her own window. “I guess I could shuffle some things around for that Sunday. Seven, right?” (She’d had no plans for Saturday or, in fact, any other day that week.)

Mr. Manson’s eyebrows climbed about an inch up his forehead. “Really? I mean, that’s great! I’ll ask my secretary to put it on my schedule right away.” He hit the phone button on his steering wheel and carefully articulated, “Call Margaret,” leaning up toward where the car phone’s microphone was presumably located in a way that made him look like a particularly ridiculous blonde meerkat. Sam tuned him out.

Curse her sudden pangs of conscience and forethought; what had she gotten herself into?

~(*0*)~

Tucker sat on his plain green bedspread that evening and stared at his phone for a good ten minutes. It was 8 p.m. and _all_ the lights in his room were on, as they had been the night before, and the night before that. His ceiling fan cast revolving swaths of shadow over the electronic knicknacks cluttering up his desk, his dresser, and the free space on his seldom-used bookshelf. As soon as he’d finished his homework, his mom had ducked her head around the doorframe–once again demonstrating her awe- and fear-inspiring Mom Senses–and asked him if he was up to talking to Tristan in the hospital. The staff still didn’t want him receiving in-person visitors (something about an infection), but they were letting him receive calls from friends and family as long as they didn’t interrupt his sleep schedule.

_Come on, Tucker. Mom made meatloaf. It’s just this...and then meatloaf. You can do anything with that kind of motivation._ He unlocked his phone and dialed the number written on his mom’s fancy Nagual’s on 7th managerial stationary. He wasn’t sure if the ringing in his ears was actually the phone or another one of his _hunches._ That freaking imaginary mosquito had been just a bit louder ever since fifth period. (You know, the period where Danny Whatever left to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back to Calc BC for another twenty minutes. Totally a coincidence. Yep.)

The click on the other end of the (not literal) line was more of a clatter. Tristan’s voice sounded like oatmeal, but like...without any oats. (Thin. It sounded thin.) “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Tuck. Enjoying the hospital cuisine? I’ve heard it’s very _avant-garde.”_

Tristan laughed, a soft, cracked sound. “You sound like the ‘bone apple-teeth’ meme.”

“Don’t I always?”

“Pretty much.” Tristan paused, and Tucker could faintly hear hospital bustle in the background: phones ringing, people talking in short, clipped tones. When Tristan came back, he sounded more serious. Urgent. “Tuck, there’s something I need to know. Do you ever get...feelings?”

Right now Tucker was mostly feeling like he very much wanted to end this conversation, but he forced a laugh. “Please, I’m a real man. My only feelings are hunger and testosterone.”

Tristan didn’t laugh. “Seriously, Tuck. I mean, like, premonitions. Bad feelings before something happens. My mom says it runs in the family, and you were there when….” He cut off, and his breathing went a little thick and heavy.

_Ah, shit._ Now Tucker felt weird and guilty. Mostly weird. I mean, this might sound super shallow and insensitive, but the guy was a _senior._ They didn’t hang out much outside of family reunions, but Tristan had always seemed unassailable and cool. Like, he got invited to parties and stuff. And he, like—okay, that was pretty much Tucker’s only metric for _cool_ since he had no sense of fashion and wasn’t super up on the senior class social hierarchy, but—oh yeah, and he had a hot girlfriend that one time! So anyway, it was weird to hear Tristan sounding...vulnerable.

Ugh. Now he _had_ to tell the truth. “Yeah, dude, I know what you mean. You have it too?”

Tristan laughed. “Yeah. Guess it’s not quite so reliable when the bad thing’s happening to _you,_ but that’s the universe for you.”

Tucker flopped backward onto his bed and stared up at his ceiling fan. His mom had turned it on and opened the windows to clear the smell of moldering laundry and sneakers corrupted by gym class from his room, but the air still seemed stagnant and heavy, _gelatinous_ somehow. Looking up at the blades made Tucker feel like he was in a blender. _Round and round…._ “So does Aunt Lacey have it too? What does she say about it?”

“She says you’ve always got to follow it or terrible things will happen. Can’t say I’ve stuck to that advice. It’s _freaky._ Plus, not enough hours in the day, you know?” He chuckled bitterly. “But who knows, maybe that’s how I ended up here.”

There was a pause. Tucker, as a rule, hated pauses, so he broke it first. “Sooo...was there a point to this or are we just generally talking about our feelings?”

Tristan must have dozed off a little, because he snapped back to the conversation with an “Oh! Right. There was something weird during the—in, in the library. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it felt _wrong._ Like dead things. Or, like, like _pollution!_ Unnatural and, okay, I’ll say it, _evil_ . And you know we only get these senses if there’s something we’ve gotta do, or something we’ve gotta _stop.”_ That was news to Tucker, but he kept it to himself. “I’ve spent a lot of time avoiding it, but sometimes you just _can’t._ And this seems big, like, _cannot sidestep_ big. And I can’t do it from here, man. So it has to be you.”

Tucker choked on his own spit. He bolted back up into a sitting position while the room seemed to spin in the opposite direction of the fan, so now the _fan blades_ were standing still. “What?! Dude, _no,_ I can’t fight a serial killer, are you _crazy?!_ I’m high schooler! I don’t even work out!”

“I know it sounds insane, but I get the feeling this isn’t the sort of thing that can be solved by one of _them._ It has to be one of us.”

“The hell?! By ‘them’ do you mean the highly qualified cops who are, like, trained for and experienced in this kind of stuff? Because, like, I make plenty of ACAB jokes but I’m not trying to be some sort of _vigilante,_ man! Just, no! You know what, why am I even trying to justify this; this isn’t the sort of thing that you _have_ to justify. It’s just not going to happen!”

Tristan sounded like he was fading a little bit when he replied, “Well, good luck trying to get out of it, I guess. But for something this weird, I’m not sure the cosmos will be willing to cut you a break. Speaking from experience.”

“But your theory is the universe is letting _you_ out of it because you got stabbed.” Tucker started laughing a little hysterically. “Great. Never thought I’d ever be _jealous_ of someone for that.”

Tristan was possibly feeling the pain meds; his voice had gone a little wobbly. “Not cool, dude. I’m _wounded._ Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you. Thanks for calling, and I guess say hi to Aunt Angela for me.”

“Oh, just like that? That’s it, you just tell me I’ve got to single-handedly stop a serial killer because the universe apparently doesn’t have a LinkedIn account, and then you want to say hi to my mom.”

“Pretty much.” Yeah, he was definitely sounding a little loopy. “I delivered the message; not my problem anymore.”

“I’m so happy for you.”

Okay, _yeah,_ he’d just been stabbed, but was Tristan usually this much of an asshole? No wonder they never hung out. Tucker suddenly felt like this was a very natural place to end the conversation. He dropped his phone away from his ear and was about to hit the big red button when he heard faint squawking from the speaker. He sighed. Against his better judgement, he lifted the phone again. “What was that?”

Tristan’s voice was back to being serious, if thready. “I said, for what it’s worth, I really am sorry.”

“...Thanks, I guess.” Tucker hung up the phone, then hung his head and stared at it for a while.

~(*0*)~

  
It was only four hours later when he was finally getting to sleep and mulling over the conversation in one corner of his mind when he suddenly sat upright, throwing off the covers with the violence of his reaction, and asked the dark, empty room, “Wait, ‘wounded.’ Was that a fucking _pun?!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. The oatmeal joke barely even makes sense, but I left it in entirely for my own amusement.  
> 2\. Tucker's a lil ooc, but like, it's hard to joke about things from an objective distance when you're the protagonist and they're probably going to try to kill you.  
> 3\. okay, yes, i drew on my own middle school emo phase for sam's pop culture influences. black veil brides has some decent songs dont expose me guys  
> 4\. just fixed a timeline whoopsie, hope nobody noticed lol


	3. Two Black Marbles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our hero makes a sort-of friend, pretty much fails to influence a person, and has a vaguely freaky dream. Not necessarily in that order.

Two Black Marbles

_or alternatively:_ How to Win a Land War in Australasia

Tucker kept one eye on the new kid through all of Tuesday’s English, CompSci, and French classes. He could tell Sam was doing the same in English–it was usually her best subject, but this time when she got cold called she actually had to fudge the answer for once. And they were studying _Poe._ Sam _memorized_ Poe. Tucker vowed then and there to find a cask of Amontillado on eBay for her next birthday just so she could never live this down.

Anyway, between the two of them they were in five of Danny’s six classes, so they had eyes on him practically all day. Here’s what they’d learned by Tuesday afternoon:

  1. No one had warned him not to eat the ominously pulsing sludge the cafeteria called “baked bean surprise.”
  2. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, since he really shouldn’t have _needed_ a warning not to eat something called “baked bean surprise.”
  3. Math seemed to be his best subject, although neither of them was in his Chem class so they couldn’t testify to his performance there.
  4. In classes he was good at, he answered questions, but not, like, an unusual number of questions.
  5. In the rest of his classes, he was mostly asleep.
  6. Seriously, the dude could power nap.
  7. He was really bad at keeping his shoes tied.
  8. He was even worse at opening his locker. It took him almost three minutes between first and second periods and even longer between second and third, to the point where during mid-morning break he just sighed and dumped all of his remaining textbooks into the enormous space-themed backpack.
  9. He wasn’t very good at making friends. In fact, he didn’t really seem to be actively trying. At lunch, he just picked a shady spot outside the school, facing the field, and listened to music while he poked dubiously at his beans.
  10. The “surprise” in the baked beans probably merited suspicion and rigorous investigation more than Danny.



He seemed like a totally normal kid. A slacker, possibly a low-key druggie if his ridiculously long bathroom break the day before had been any indication, but not anything that couldn’t be found in every typical high school across America.

And yet, every time he walked into a room Tucker’s flesh _crawled._

Which was really annoying him, honestly. He probably wouldn’t have paid Danny any attention but for the way his ~~spidey~~ nightmare senses tingled every time the guy entered a room. Sam was invested in the serial killer angle probably because of her fascination with the macabre (her Netflix recommendations...really scared him, sometimes), but he’d promised himself after the phone call with Tristan that he wasn’t going to get involved. And he would enthusiastically keep that promise, too, if his skin would just stay where it was _supposed_ to around the kid he shared half of his classes with.

On Wednesday, Sam was Tucker’s carpool to school (since her parents wouldn’t let her drive what they called the “nice” cars, she was stuck with the boring old Maserati, and she didn’t have access to it Mondays or Tuesdays because of whatever her mom’s newest charity thing was). Pretty much immediately, Tucker noted with a cringe that her driving wasn’t the only thing that was a bit more erratic than usual. The first thing she asked him after he’d heaved his backpack into the trunk (no worries about breaking anything; he was, as always, clutching his PDA to his chest like a baby) was “So what did your cousin say?”

“What?” He’d been really making an effort to put the incident out of his mind, and also he’d gotten about four hours of sleep the night before, so for a second he was genuinely confused.

Sam huffed and swerved violently out into the street without signalling. Tucker subtly grabbed that handle thingy on the ceiling at about head height on the passenger side (what his mom had, during his driver’s training, called the “Oh-Jesus handle”). “You went to the hospital to visit him yesterday, right? Did he say anything about the attack?” Sam had apparently exhausted her rather limited reserves of sensitivity on the bleachers on Monday. Which was fair; Tucker was admittedly surprised she’d managed _that_ as well as she had.

“Uh, I actually talked to him on the phone Monday night. He said some pretty crazy stuff.”

Sam waited until the last millisecond to come to a screeching halt behind a red sedan stopped at an intersection. Several someones behind them honked loudly. Sam continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. “What?! Dude, why didn’t you tell me yesterday?”

Tucker was still trying to control his breathing after the near-collision, so it took him a second to answer. “It was about my, ya know, _feelings,_ and I know you don’t believe in that stuff! Plus, he was high as a kite on pain meds, so in this case I might kind of agree with you.”

“Okay, fair, I guess. But what did he _say?”_ The light turned green, and Sam tailgated the red sedan until it very deliberately changed lanes.

Tucker opened his window so he could be ready to apologize to irate motorists. It’d become a sort of system: Sam cut people off and Tucker yelled “Sorry!” if it looked like they were going to get road raged. Which happened a lot. When Sam wasn’t doing the road raging, that is. He stuck his head out the window to try to see around the next car, a blue jeep, as he called back, “I don’t know, weird crap!” Satisfied that they weren’t about to cause a pile-up at the next intersection, he settled back into his seat. “Apparently he and my aunt both have the same premonition-y thing that I do, and if you get a bad feeling about something big it means the universe is going to, like, make you fix it. And since he got stabbed, now he gets to lay on a bed completely blitzed for like two weeks while _I_ apparently have to stop a serial killer? Or the universe will, like, give me a wedgie or something.”

Sam glanced at him quickly in the rear view mirror. “You know, he has a point.”

_“What?_ Uh, no, he really doesn’t.”

She licked her lips, slightly fading her grey-purple lipstick. “I mean, we do _live_ in this neighborhood. We’re tapped in. We’re connected to _two_ of the victims and one _attempted_ victim, you’re, like, one of the only living witnesses, and you’ve got your premonition thing….”

Tucker felt an intense need to cut her off _right there._ “Sam! There are people who actually get paid to do this stuff. The only thing I’ve ever gotten paid for is working a cash register at Walgreens, and I was barely even qualified for that.” When he gave her his full attention, he could see the way she was holding her jaw: rigid, like she couldn’t _wait_ to respond. Suspicion slithered its way along the dome of his skull. “Wait, is this your whole government thing again?”

Sam started gesturing wildly with her hands the way she always did when she got defensive (pretty rarely) or when she got argumentative (quite frequently). This meant that she was not holding the wheel. This meant that the car swerved violently. This very much didn’t help Tucker get less panicky as she wound up for a good long debate. “Okay, but bureaucratic incompetence coupled with a culture of secrecy, of–of power-mongering, and declining trust in individual _intelligence_ and _agency_ –if you would just _read_ Ayn Rand–”

“Dude, the government isn’t some, like, faceless, shady alien entity! It’s a bunch of people _for the most part”_ –he glared at her to make sure she had caught the qualification–“doing their best to make good decisions.”

Sam kept her eyes fixed on the yellow lines running down the center of the street. “I know. That’s why it scares me.”

Tucker paused for a second to gather his thoughts. Sam always seemed to _want_ to argue, but Tucker was terrible at it. He didn’t understand how someone could enjoy being in conflict with others. He’d rather crack a joke, break the tension, spread some smooth peanut-butter banter over whatever was awkward or whatever he disagreed with and steer the conversation in a more fun direction; wasn’t it natural to want people to _like_ you?

So he didn’t know the joys of debate. He did know Sam, though: She tended to think in high-minded ideological terms, so the best way to make her see reason was to force her to reconsider her points from a more down-to-earth perspective. “Okay, so what happens when we catch him?”

“We...call the police.”

“And how do we prove who it is in the first place? I mean, I’ve seen cop shows, dude! Sneaking around, probably snooping on some _whack_ people’s private lives–what do we do if he catches us?”

Sam’s hold on the wheel got a little more stiff. She was wavering. “That’s a real hypothetical _if.”_

“And?”

She huffed through her nose like a bull and pushed some of her flyaway hairs, freed by the open window from ponytail captivity, back behind her ears. “I dunno, kick him in the balls and run?”

Now _Tucker_ was the one wildly gesticulating, because she _had_ to know that was ridiculous. “Sam, that is reckless well past the point of ordinary stupidity! You’re, like, trespassing into insanity there, dude!” He’d been trying for a while to catch her eyes, and at this she snapped her head over and glared at him. Tucker gave her what was probably a weird little panicky half-smile and tried to calm down. “No offense. But, I mean, this is a serial killer. We are _high schoolers._ Not only that, but we are shrimpy, untalented, _weak-ass_ high schoolers. I, personally, have never taken a self-defense class in my life! My mile time is _over ten minutes,_ dude! This body is a finely tuned instrument of love, not death; the one time I tried to hit someone I ended up punching my own—!”

“Okay, Tuck, I get the picture. It was a dumb idea, I know.”

She focused back on the road and stewed in silence. Tucker hated silence. It almost made him regret winning the argument. The road narrowed to one lane on either side, then one lane period, and they entered a roundabout surrounded by tidy, upscale white adobe houses with red terra cotta roofs and stylized bars on the windows. They were almost to the school.

_Ugh._ Sam was actually driving with a modicum of caution now, which meant she was in a really bad mood and was probably planning to sulk all day. He offered her a hesitant, goofy smile. “Hey, if you want, in the free time left over from _not_ hunting serial killers today we could go sabotage Nasty Burger’s deep fryer again. You know how much of a sacrifice of ideals that is for me.”

She snorted, and one corner of her mouth twitched up. “Nah, my parents will probably take the car if I get in trouble with the police again. Nice try, though.”

“Hmm.” He considered. “Yeah, on second thought, today’s not actually a great day for me either. I’m feeling pretty fried.”

It took her a moment. Then, at the next light, she slammed on the brakes and gave him the most disgusted, dead-eyed look he’d ever seen on a human face.

Tucker grinned shamelessly at her and hit the button on the side of his seat that slowly reclined it back out of range of her poisonous glare. The _“whirrrr”_ of the seat’s motor was too much for Sam, and she snorted out a laugh and banged her forehead against her hands on the top of the wheel, shoulders shaking visibly. When she raised her face, more flyaway hairs had come out of her ponytail to frame her face like a wispy, dishevelled lion’s mane. “Tucker, whyyy?!” Tucker just kept grinning like a dog who’d eaten all the towels as well as the shoes.

Internally, he was hearing his own personal pom-poms-and-ponytails cheer squad. Crisis averted, and a pun had won the day. As it _should._

~(*0*)~

Tucker should have known that Sam wouldn’t truly be diverted from her course by something as insignificant and trifling as _logic._ Everything was fine through all six periods, even his in-class tingles of premonition (which he’d decided to thenceforth refer to exclusively as “the uh-oh feeling”) having died down a bit since the day before. Then came lunchtime. That was when he let Sam march him into the cafeteria and toward an empty table at the back of the hall, only to startle and punch her hard on the arm when she suddenly called, “Hey! New kid! Danny!”

Alone at the next table over, Danny looked up and quickly checked behind him, just in case Sam might have been referring to another new kid named Danny. He quickly fumbled out out one earbud and motioned with the hand holding it toward his chest. “Me?”

“Yeah, you. Come sit with us!”

Danny looked a little panicked for a second, but then he sort of shrugged and started gathering up his lunch tray. “Thanks. But, uh, don’t you guys need to get food?”

Sam grinned and held up her purple bat-themed lunch bag (it’d come with her backpack from ninth grade, and even though she’d ditched the backpack sophomore year she couldn’t bring herself to throw the lunch bag away). “Brought mine from home. Tucker, you gonna go get lunch?”

“Uh. Right.” With one last meaningful glare at Sam and a slightly sickly-looking smile at Danny, Tucker headed toward the end of the lunch line, adjusting his beret on the way. He had to squeeze past Danny and gritted his teeth when the expected shiver ran down his spine and back up again like the slider on a zipper. There was a weird smell, too, like lemons soaking in chlorine. If it was cologne, the kid needed to get his nose examined.

The cafeteria was a large room with white walls and big windows that let in a good amount of natural light. About fifteen plastic tables with office-style chairs were set up on the hardwood floors, and basketball hoops hung halfway folded up toward the ceiling on both ends. About a quarter of the way from one wall, a giant white curtain separated the kitchen from the eating area, and along that curtain was the gleaming chrome counter that serviced the lunch line. The cafeteria was usually pretty empty, since the kids had permission to take their lunches and eat anywhere on the school grounds; currently only ten of the tables hosted chattering students or the occasional loner staring off into the abyss while mechanically chewing his or her sandwich. In Tucker and Sam’s freshman year there had been one centralized cafeteria where all students had been required to eat, but that building had collapsed in a freak earthquake the day after Sam had gotten her still-infamous pet project of an ultra-recyclo-vegetarian menu implemented (she was just vegan now, thank god), and the money had never come in from the city to rebuild. Two and a half years later, the school was still using this repurposed gym that couldn’t even fit an eighth of the student body at once.

Tucker glowered his way back across the hall to their table to find Sam and Danny laughing so hard that Sam visibly almost choked. He set down his tray of mystery-meat-and-limp-lettuce-on-whole-wheat sandwich with ill humor. _Jeez, you leave Sam alone for three minutes and apparently she befriends the possibly-supernatural serial murder suspect._

“Seriously, look it up on Wikipedia. It’s _actually_ the best thing I’ve ever read,” Danny wrapped up, snickering.

Sam finished chewing a giant bite of her veggie wrap and swallowed with some difficulty. “I’ll do that. Yo, Tuck, have you heard of the Great Emu War?”

“I’m sorry, _what?”_

“Yeah, in, like, the ‘30s Australia had a military operation to deal with the emu infestation—and they _lost.”_ Danny’s grin was bright and mischievous, which sparked some weird, jarring cognitive dissonance seeing as the only emotions he’d seen Danny exhibit thus far were “tired,” “bored,” “tired,” “mopey,” and “exhausted.”

It surprised a snort out of Tucker. “Wait, I was gone for, like, five seconds. How did you guys get from small talk to emu infestations?”

Sam shrugged. “I asked him what his favorite military conflict was. It’s a surprisingly good icebreaker.”

Danny washed down a bite of his own mystery meat sandwich with a swig from one of the only-slightly-spoiled cafeteria boxed milks and glanced at her in interest. “Wait, really? People usually have an answer to that?”

“Mhm, i’sh pre-y fummy,” Sam confirmed around the leafy end of her wrap.

“Heh, and here I thought I was special. That was a fun forty seconds.”

Sam inclined her head toward Tucker. “What about you? What’s your favorite war?”

“Uhh...what’s that one _300_ is about?”

Sam raised one disdainful eyebrow at him. “The Persian Wars?”

Danny raised one hand. “Is that the same as the Peloponnesian War or not?”

Sam turned the _look_ on him. “Danny, you’re _in_ my World History class.”

“I know, that’s why I’m asking.”

“We talked about the Peloponnesian War _yesterday.”_

“I have a massive sleep debt and a general lack of motivation.” Danny shrugged and took another bite of his sandwich.

Tucker saw an opening. After all, if they were going to kinda-sorta investigate Danny, they might as well _do_ it. “Yeah, you totally zoned through English.” (And CompSci and half of French, but it would be kind of stalkerish to mention he’d noticed what Danny was doing in all of the classes they shared. Hey, it was hard to ignore the source of your paranormal heebie-jeebies.) “What do you even do all night?”

Danny shrugged, avoiding their eyes for the first time since they’d broken the ice. He dropped the half-eaten sandwich on his plate. “You know, the usual. Netflix, video games.”

Huh. Well, that was vaguely suspicious, but Tucker could always use someone else to one-on-one in Doomed when Sam was busy, like, organizing a bake sale to to save the blue-speckled giraffe. Consider his interest piqued. “Any recom–”

“Hey, Foley.”

Tucker’s blood auto-transmuted into frozen sludge for an entirely mundane reason. He did a slow swivel, and sure enough, Dash was looming over him horror movie-style, Kwan a few steps behind. Sure, Dash hadn’t been all “let’s get physical” since he’d messed with the wrong senior’s kid brother and some actual gang members had kicked his ass right into the hospital midway through sophomore year, but Tucker couldn’t exactly help the way his lizard brain reacted. His Pavlovian conditioning meant he automatically associated that blonde, slicked-back ‘60s hairdo and those oddly contrasting black eyebrows with moderate pain and immoderate humiliation.

His usual policy when he was humiliated was “return to sender,” but all of his smart comments seemed to have run for the hills. They’d probably taken the way his heart had jumped into his throat as a signal to vamoose, and boy, did Tucker wish he could follow. Luckily, Sam had his back this time around. “What the fuck do you want, Dash?” Short, sweet, and to the point: Tucker approved. Danny mostly looked confused.

Dash shuffled his feet in their Yeti-size definitely-bought-them-on-eBay Yeezys. “We’re not talking to _you,_ Manson,” he muttered. There was a weird look on his face. Like he was about to hurl or something. Maybe he was really hungover. Or—uncomfortable? Kwan elbowed him hard, and the human incarnation of the Minotaur from every crappily animated fantasy game cleared his throat. “Uhh, Foley. We just wanted to say...sorry about what happened to Tristan. He’s a pretty great guy, and he’s thrown some epic parties, so, like...yeah.”

Kwan nodded emphatically. “Anything we can do, man? Could you tell him to let us know if he, like, needs help?”

Okay, had they phased into another universe or something? Was the LSD in the mystery meat making Tucker hallucinate all this while in reality he was passed out on the floor, foaming at the mouth? “Uhh...thanks? I’ll...let him know, I guess.”

He couldn’t help side-eyeing the two probable steroid abusers as Dash shrugged uncomfortably and stuffed his hands in the pocket of his omnipresent red Letterman. He nodded once, looking somewhere over Tucker’s head, and then started back toward his table with Kwan trailing behind like a really muscular sheepdog.

There was momentary silence at the table. Danny broke it by finishing off his carton of milk with one giant glug and then tossing it at a nearby trash can (he missed). “Well, that was awkward.” He got up to go retrieve it and throw it away properly.

Sam grimaced. “Yeah, stay away from those guys. What you just saw was an outlier; they’re usually total assholes.”

Tucker started to voice his enthusiastic agreement, but the bell rang, cutting him off with the unnecessary staticky aggression characteristic of most public high school PA systems. “Ah, crap.” They all hastily gathered trash onto their trays (or, in Sam’s case, gathered up their biodegradable lunch wrappings and reusable thermoses made from recycled materials) while Tucker stuffed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and chewed quickly. _Wow, that was terrible,_ he thought through the immediate wave of regret. Only the school cafeteria could pervert the natural order of things enough to make him hate meat. “I gotta get to Robotics. You have MUN, right?”

Sam nodded. Danny, who’d started to go back to staring into the middle distance (Tucker couldn’t help thinking of it as his “I-can-still-smell-the-napalm mode”), perked back up. “Oh, yeah, my mom signed me up for that. You think you could show me where to go?”

“Yeah, sure.” Sam was oddly cheery this afternoon. Was Tucker’s company alone really that boring? “See ya, Tuck!”

Danny trailed a step or so in her wake, as one tended to do when confronted with the gravitational phenomenon known as Sam Manson’s force of personality. “Yeah, it was cool meeting you!” Danny offered one last friendly, sideways smirk as they slid between Tucker and the next table, and Tucker caught another whiff of that weird smell (along with the usual goose walking over his grave). It reminded him of the family road trip where their car had broken down next to a forest after a thunderstorm. The sky had been unrepentantly bright, and the air’d smelled almost bitterly clean, like… _ozone!_ That was what it was; they’d talked about it in one of his middle school science classes, about the way you could smell ozone after it rained. But there was something else underneath it, too, something almost sickly sweet. Like an old tree stump that had gotten wet during the storm and started slowly, surely to _rot._ He narrowed his eyes as he watched them cross the cafeteria and pass out of sight through its doors, talking the whole way. _“So, Sam, do you have to, like,_ participate _in MUN, or is it the sort of thing where no one will notice if you kinda drift off a little bit….”_

_Hmph._ Tucker shrugged, pacifying himself with the way the physical motion reinforced his internal decision. He was just going to ignore the strangeness; if he didn’t get involved, it couldn’t hurt him. He shoved his own trash through the swinging door for garbage and deposited his plastic lunch tray on top the increasingly tall and haphazard red stack on the trash bin, then turned to head to Robotics with a skip in his step. Behind him, the stack teetered silently, unnoticed, ever closer to the edge.

~(*0*)~

That night, Tucker dreamt about the fox for the first time.

It was small and grey, and it padded quietly next to him everywhere he went. At first, he was walking down an empty street in the rain, and it trotted out of an alley to join him. The street became a mountain, which became a forest of charred trees like branching nerves exposed to the chilling breeze, which became his favorite Mexican restaurant with that same wind buffeting laminated pictures of _enchiladas verdes_ and street corn. He took a seat, and the fox settled at his feet and turned its snout toward him, unwavering. Its black eyes were wet and terrible and blank. The lady at the counter smiled sunnily. She looked familiar, he thought, and then he thought it was silly that he should think _anything_ because he didn’t exist and hadn’t ever existed, had he? And when he looked down for his legs, just to double-check, they were gone and all that remained were the wet eyes of the fox, hanging in the air like two black marbles next to an empty chair at an empty table in a Mexican restaurant whose posters flapped loudly against each other in the pitiless breeze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> or ALTERNATIVELY: adventures in lunch food and denial


	4. A Stab in the Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Local children misuse evacuation routes and invade each other's personal space. Oh, yeah, and there's another body.

A Stab in the Dark

or alternatively: Quality Time with the Recently Deceased

Tucker wanted to like the new kid. Truly. He did.

Danny was funny and reasonably friendly, he played the same kinds of video games as Tucker and was more of a nerd than Sam, and the degree to which the universe seemed to despise him really made Tucker feel better about his own life. Danny was like a walking, wisecracking schadenfreude machine, and watching him try to open a locker or wrestle with the zipper on his backpack for ten minutes or whatever was  _ incredibly _ cathartic. Did that make Tucker a bad person? Most likely yes.

The point is, it should have been easy for Tucker to like Danny. And it would’ve been, if Danny weren’t so  _ incredibly suspicious and weird. _

The half-hour-or-more disappearances became a recurring and noticeable phenomenon over the course of the week. Every few days Danny would give some terrible excuse to duck out of class and then be gone for an extremely unreasonable amount of time. Was he on his man period or something? (Sam’s first suggestion.) Tucker would assume he had some sort of, like, digestive problem and leave him alone, but one time he happened to go to the bathroom right after Danny left, and Danny was most definitely not there. And there was only one bathroom on that floor of the building, and it was in perfect working order! The next most obvious conclusion was that he was ditching class to inject horse tranquilizers (or, ya know, smoke weed), but Danny just didn’t  _ seem  _ like a stoner. He was too sharp and with it  _ right  _ after returning from his mysterious sojourns to the most forgotten cobwebby corners of Casper High. On top of that, there were the mostly-dissipated weird feelings and his stratospheric B.O., which was weird even for high school. And Sam said his hands were always, like,  _ really  _ cold.

Sam, incidentally, had been hanging out with him a lot. She said it was like being the unwitting protagonist of a Lovecraft novel. Tucker had two problems with this: first of all, people shouldn’t read early twentieth century literature for fun, and second of all, who would want to live in a Lovecraft novel?! (When you hung out with Sam enough, you absorbed some things.)

However, when Tucker dragged himself through his front door after school on Tuesday, September 17th, he wasn’t thinking about any of that. After all, he had other things in his life to deal with, like that essay he was planning to procrastinate on for weeks and then scramble to half-ass at 2 a.m., or how his policeman uncle-once-removed (or something like that) kept leaving his gigantic shoes right in the blind spot at the bottom of the stairs and eating all the cereal.

He took off his hat to run one absentminded hand through his fledgling dreads, ambled into the living room, and froze.

His aunt and uncle, Tristan’s parents, were sitting on the blue sofa in front of the coffee table. He couldn’t see their faces, but his mom in the nearest chair had his aunt’s hand in a death grip, and they were all staring fixedly at the TV.

Tucker opened his mouth to ask something and then shut it. The volume was turned down so low that the news anchor’s voice sounded rustling and strange, and that quiet along with the tightness in their shoulders strangled the words in his throat. Carefully, slowing his steps with some instinctual solemnity, he moved around behind his mom’s chair so he could hear the news and see the shifting colors of the screen batter his aunt’s face.

The ticker-tape at the bottom of the screen read, “Chicago serial killer claims another victim.”

The anchors were Tiffany Snow and Lance Thunder. The channel was the local news.

Tucker literally jumped into the air when the doorbell rang. He nearly swallowed his kidneys and  _ just  _ managed to catch a stack of  _ Better Homes and Beyond  _ magazines before they fell off his mom’s wicker nightstand-style table. His aunt and uncle glanced over, looking startled and red-eyed besides, and Tucker’s mom gave him a meaningful glare.

“H...hi, Aunt Grace. Uncle Jay,” he mumbled. They looked kind of out of it, slow to respond. Tucker crumpled his beret in one hand and gave a little half-wave as he turned away awkwardly. “Uhh...sorry.”

As soon as he made it through the threshold and out of sight, he  _ jogged _ to the front door.

Sam was standing on the faded welcome mat, finger raised to push the doorbell button again. Her hair was up in a full ponytail with purple clips holding back her half-bangs, and her eyes were a little wild. As soon as she registered who it was, she started back down the driveway toward her currently double-parked blue Maserati. “If there’s  _ any _ possibility we can stop this, we have to investigate,” she tossed back over her shoulder. “Get in the car.”

It was that or stay a moment longer in the unnerving, silent apartment. Tucker called in, “I’m going out with Sam! Back before sunset, I promise!” He waited a beat for his mom’s faint affirmative, then didn’t even look back as he closed the door behind him and hurried after her. The gravel crunched like popcorn under his sneakers, too loud in the afternoon sun.

~(*0*)~

Sam pulled up and parked about two feet from the curb in front of the weirdest house Tucker had ever seen. It was a regular two-story brownstone for the most part, but the address number was on a  _ neon sign  _ on the side of the house rather than painted tastefully next to the door, and there was what looked like a modified observatory just visible over the edge of the roof. Were Danny’s parents astronomers or something?

She marched up the paved path to the door with the same air of purpose she’d maintained since showing up at Tucker’s house unannounced. He didn’t know how she kept it up; just watching her was exhausting. The button for the doorbell was hanging out of the wall by a few loose wires, so Sam knocked three times, briskly. While they waited, Tucker eyed the bronze doorknob set into the light blue door. There was some weird detailing around the keyhole, an engraved horizontal leaf shape. The inset circle for the keyhole turned it into a small eye.

Someone yelled something muffled inside the house, and then the door swung open to reveal a pretty red-haired woman in her late 50s, wearing a teal tee shirt and leggings. She gave them a puzzled smile. “Hi! Can I help you?” She had a husky, low voice that reminded Tucker of his old gym teacher.

Sam smiled warmly, which gave Tucker the creeps. “Hey! We’re friends of Danny’s. From school!”

She cocked her head inquisitively in a way that reminded Tucker of Danny, and a few strands of hair escaped her neat bun. “Oh! Sorry, he didn’t say anything about having friends over. Come on in!” She pushed the door shut, then turned and craned her head toward the staircase Tucker could see to the right, just beyond the green-walled entryway.  _ “DANNY?!”  _ Tucker winced.  _ Damn,  _ this lady was loud.

_ “YEAH?”  _ Danny’s voice echoed from somewhere above them. Rapid footsteps sounded from that direction, quieter than Tucker would have expected based on the volume of everything else in this house. He’d become aware as soon as Mrs. Fenton shut the door of about six things whirring, what sounded like a leaky air conditioner blasting, and irregular mechanical beeps that seemed to emanate from every corner of the room. Danny trotted around the corner into the entryway and stopped short. “Oh, uh, hey.”

Tucker mustered a smile but let Sam do the talking. She did not disappoint. “Hey! Sorry to drop in unannounced, but you said we should come over sometime soon to play Doomed 4: The Kiss of Doom, right? And my parents’ housekeepers are doing the bathrooms right now so I thought I’d get out of the way for a few hours.” She sounded downright apologetic. Maybe miracles  _ were  _ real. “Anyway, you free?”

Danny took a visible moment to process this spiel. “Uhh, yeah! Yeah.” His mom smiled and headed away without further ado, and Danny started back toward the stairs. “Come on up.”

The stairs were dark wood with a blue carpet, and they creaked when Sam and Tucker put their weight in the bowed middle of a step. Tucker held the railing and kept to the edges. “Dude, how did you get the new Doomed this early?! I thought it didn’t come out ‘til mid-October!” Okay, so maybe Tucker was getting a bit distracted from the mission, but he’d been excited for this game for months.

Danny smirked as they made it to the landing and padded down a hallway toward a white door with one of those dry-erase calendars on it (still displaying events from December 2018. Nice). “One of my mom’s friends from college works in production. He lets us bug-test sometimes.”

“Sweet.” Sam caught Tucker grinning and sent him a warning glance behind Danny’s back. Right. Possible serial killer. What exactly were they doing here, again?

They followed Danny through the white door into a room painted a surprising shade of lime-green. The twin bed in the corner was covered in a blue-black comforter printed with tiny stars and corkscrewing galaxies lined with visible nebulae in purple and green. The walls were adorned mostly with pictures of Danny and some combination of family members. The family seemed to consist of his mom, a younger woman who looked a lot like her (sister?), and an absolutely e _ nor _ mous man whom Tucker assumed was Danny’s dad, and who seemed to be wearing some variation of an obnoxiously orange Hawaiian shirt in every picture. Only a few photos showed Danny with kids their age–friends from Chicago, most likely.

Sam clicked her tongue impatiently while Danny sat down to boot up his computer (Tucker would judge him for not having a laptop, but he could understand the benefits of a more powerful wired-in setup. Also, it would maybe be a  _ bit _ hypocritical and unfair to Sheryl, his current PDA). Tucker could see in her eyes the moment she decided on her angle of attack. “Crazy what they’re saying on the news, right? About the Chicago killer dumping another body?”

Tucker just managed to suppress a snort. Did she really think that was going to–Danny had gone still. Noticeably. Blue eyes darted quickly,  _ guiltily  _ to Tucker and then back to his screen. Tucker’s heart started hammering, and one foot slid back toward the door, stealthily.

Then Danny responded, keeping his focus on the screen, “Yeah, I heard about that.” A pause. “Uh, sorry about...I mean, he hurt your...cousin, or, uh, something. Right, Tuck?”

_ Oh.  _ After the whole Dash and Kwan confrontation, he must have asked around for an explanation. The reaction hadn’t been  _ guilty; _ he’d just felt awkward talking this way about a guy who’d damaged Tucker’s family.

Then and there, Tucker pretty much exonerated Danny in his mind. He probably ditched classes because he had a serious vaping habit, or—and here was a novel idea—he just  _ really hated his classes.  _ Both miles more likely than, like, “astral projecting  _ with knife” _ or something. “Yeah, my cousin Tristan. It’s cool, though, he’s totally okay.”

Sam, however, apparently hadn’t even considered  _ tact _ as an explanation for Danny’s behavior (of course) and wanted one last stab, so to speak, at getting him to expose his guilt. “You guys have to admit, though, with how popular true crime stuff is, having a serial killer in our city...I mean, it’s pretty sick.”

Danny goggled at her like  _ he  _ was the one getting ready to run for it. “Uhh, that’s not really my thing.” His right hand, resting on the computer desk, curled into a fist, and his eyes strayed into a corner, unfocused. “I think anyone who could end someone else’s  _ whole life  _ on purpose is  _ disgusting.” _

Woah. Tucker was kind of taken aback. He’d never seen someone look so  _ angry  _ talking about impersonal tragedy. Danny’s lip actually curled up in revulsion before he seemed to sort of shake himself and retreat back onto stabler conversational ground. “I mean, you know. It’s kind of a big deal.” He laughed lightly. “The biggest deal, really.”

“Yeah, I agree.” Tucker glared pointedly at Sam, who seemed almost put out to discover that Danny was almost definitely not a psychotic killer. “So...Kiss of Doom?”

Danny grinned mischievously. “I got three consoles that can hook in. Time to be complete hypocrites and murder some some NPCs.”

  
~(*0*)~

Okay, so it was official now: Tucker genuinely liked Danny. He was still a pretty unknown quantity, but Tucker already vibed with him more than he did with Mikey or any of the other guys he hung out with to talk about coding. He, Sam, and Danny played Doomed for a while, trading snarky commentary and trying their best to reenact the worst, most physically impossible glitches (Danny was  _ terrifyingly  _ flexible, but Sam and Danny agreed that Tucker did the best faces), and then when they got bored of repeatedly losing a boss fight and staying stuck on one level, they walked down to the nearby mall with Danny’s wallet and the loose change from Sam’s Maserati (the  _ irony)  _ and bought cheap slushees. They were basically just wandering around between surprisingly empty stores when Sam stopped, a subtle smirk on her face. “Hey, you guys ever worked in retail? Don’t answer that, Tucker, I know everything about you and you’ve only worked at Walgreens.”

Danny shrugged. “Nope. I haven’t actually had a job yet.”

Sam looked delighted in a very evil, very Sam kind of way. “Then I’ve got something you’ve  _ gotta  _ see.”

She led them to a discreet employee access door at the back of her favorite punk clothing outlet, Stick a Fork in It, and quickly scanned for witnesses before barging in. Tucker and Danny followed, albeit a bit more reluctantly. They ended up in a series of rough hallways that were floored in cement and walled with unplastered plywood, well-lit overhead by dangling lamps with black wires strung like telegraph lines between them.

Sam swept her arms out palms-up movie-villain style, walking backward and smirking. “This, naïve children, is the dark underside of the Westside Mall.” Her voice echoed with a strange flat quality down the corridor, which was utterly empty.

“Woah.” Tucker jogged down to where the corridor ended, only to discover that it really just intersected another identical hallway. This one had two doors bearing emergency exit warnings on the push bars. “Do these things go through the  _ whole mall?” _

“Yep, most stores have an access door to them. It’s apparently a pretty common feature, although not so much in smaller malls like Westside. They’re for evacuations and also, like, deliveries when they don’t want to deal with all the people wandering around aimlessly.”

“That’s too bad, ‘cuz these tunnels seem like an  _ awesome  _ place to wander around aimlessly.” Danny took a few running steps and jumped up, trying to touch one of the simple metal lamps, but despite his truly impressive hang time it remained just beyond reach. “How did you find out about these?!”

“They don’t really tell employees, but my ex-boyfriend I met when I worked at Stick a Fork was the owner’s son, and he let me in on it. We even had a picnic in here once on our lunch break.”

Tucker cracked open one of the doors on the adjoining corridor and quickly pulled it shut when he was treated to a view of the line outside one of the mall’s public bathrooms. “Yo, these doors aren’t even all in businesses! They’re just all over the mall in plain view!”

Sam had joined Danny in trying to touch the dangling lights, though he tended to get a lot closer even though he was only maybe an inch taller, and she let her boots clonk down loudly on the concrete before responding. “Yeah, it’s the worst kept secret of the Amity Park retail industry. It’s not even really a secret, they’re just fire corridors, but I like the vibe. They’ve got  _ mystery.” _

Danny snorted. “I’m with the delivery guys on this one. These tunnels are cool ‘cuz they let you get all over the place without having to  _ deal  _ with people. I need a system like this for, like, everywhere I go.”

Inevitably, someone gave in to childhood instincts and voiced what they were all thinking about the coolness of the air and how the long corridors stretching ahead of you looked  _ so  _ inviting and run-able. Really, their true purpose was rather self-evident. And then they were sprinting down the hallways and skidding around corners, laughing breathlessly, converse and combat boots slapping oh-so-satisfyingly on the concrete underneath them, getting just as hopelessly lost as they’d ever hoped they could be.

Tucker was the first to tire out. “Hey! Flyboy and Wandergirl!” Admittedly not his best work, but he was literally wheezing. He dropped to the ground and leaned heavily against the nearest plywood support beam. “Stop trying to ditch me!”

Sam’s laughter echoed around the next bend in the corridor. To her credit, though, in a few seconds he could hear the sound of her and Danny’s feet heading back toward him. A moment later they reappeared in the flesh, both breathing heavily and stumbling over their feet.

“Dude, I shouldn’t have eaten that whole slushee,” Sam groan-laughed, clutching her stomach and propping herself up on the wall opposite him. “And I definitely shouldn’t have gotten blue raspberry.”

“Yeah, the laws of nature say you shouldn’t  _ ever _ get blue raspberry.” Tucker pulled a face. “Just  _ get lemonade.” _

“I think she’s too goth for that,” Danny piped in just as Sam retorted with “I don’t like yellow, okay?!” and they all fell over themselves laughing again, though maybe Sam’s red face wasn’t entirely from the running.

“Is there anything else to do at the Westside mall?” Danny asked, idly gesturing with one limp hand. “Right now I’m getting the impression it’s just Starbucks, Lululemon, Macy’s, and an unnecessary number of frozen yogurt places slowly moldering into bankruptcy.”

“Yep, that’s pretty much it.” Sam shrugged. “Oh, and the rooftop is supposedly the best sunset view in Amity. Is it sunset yet?”

“Nope.” Danny shrugged as Tucker pulled out his PDA to confirm.

“Yeah, he’s right. Sunset’s about an hour and a half away.”

“Shit. Oh, well.” Sam pushed herself to her feet by bracing her back against the wall. “We’d better head back now, then.”

Tucker stared blankly at her. “To do...what?”

She crossed her arms and started clomping away, leaving Tucker and Danny no choice but to scramble to their feet. “Finish that level. Seriously, am I the only one around here with  _ any  _ tenacity?”

It was almost seven when Sam and Tucker left Danny’s house. They could still the sun over the ridges of the cookie-cutter suburban houses to the west, but the sunset was splattering orange and pink over the grey clouds rolling lazily across the dome of the sky. Tucker tripped over a garden hose left lying across the Fentons’ path, bent down to twitch it back onto the grass, and from his crouch caught a flash of grey in the corner of his field of vision.

The small grey fox was sitting by the corner of the Fenton home, next to where the coils of the garden hose hung against the brick wall. It stared at him with those button-black eyes, then with deliberate slowness turned and slipped around the side of the brownstone. Before Tucker could even try to get Sam’s attention, it had disappeared into the dark space between the house and the fence.

Well, that was horrible, and Tucker very much disliked it. Despite a pretty fun day with a new casual friend, Tucker hopped into Sam’s passenger seat just a beat too fast and didn’t relax until they were speeding at 35 through the residential streets.

~(*0*)~

Tucker’s aunt and uncle were gone when he got home. His mom scolded him for cutting it so close to sunset, but her mind was clearly elsewhere. When his dad got home thirty minutes later, his mom exchanged a few hushed words with him and then left him to set down his briefcase, loosen his tie, and turn on the news. She and Tucker’s aunt and uncle had apparently recorded it with Maurice in mind. Tucker made a quick sandwich from the ingredients in the fridge and then wandered through, eyes averted, toward the stairs.

The staircase was the darkest part of the apartment even in daytime because there weren’t any windows that looked in on the space. It was narrow, hemmed in by high walls on both sides, with no railing and no lightbulb overhead (an oversight when the builders were doing the wiring). The stairs themselves were an uncarpeted dark mahogany that blended together so that you had to place each foot very carefully, and even then people coming down would often imagine a phantom step at the end only to  _ thump  _ too hard and too soon onto the floor. Tucker hated that little heart-stopping jolt of wrongness; when he was a kid he would always make sure one of the upstairs rooms had a door open and the light on so that at least the top third or so of the staircase was visible. He’d abandoned that practice after his dad had accused him of conspiring against the polar bears and being personally responsible for sustaining global warming. At sixteen years old, he was pretty comfortable now with getting up and down when he needed to.

Halfway up the stairs, he started to get that  _ feeling. _

It wasn’t like nails on a chalkboard, it was more like...drinking hand sanitizer. Swallowing it in big oily slippery gulps and feeling the sharp, sour chemicals slide into his stomach and swish sickly around his tongue. He swallowed reflexively and debated retreating to the living room. He wasn’t  _ afraid,  _ per se, but even the buffest, badass-est bodybuilder would have to admit that he had good reason to trust his instincts.

His upraised right foot was hovering above the next step up. Slowly, he braced his left forearm on the wall and lowered the foot onto the step behind him. He turned over his shoulder to look back at the warm lights spilling out onto the first step. “Dad?”

His dad’s shadow shifted across the floor, just barely visible from beyond the doorframe. “Yeah?” The warm light flickered once.

The feeling faded down a bit, mixing with regular nerves until Tucker wasn’t quite sure if it was real. Maybe he’d just had a bad burrito. And either way, what was he going to do, never go upstairs again? “...Nothing.”

“Mhmm.” His dad had already refocused on the screen.

Tucker breathed out once, long and shaky. He turned and jogged up the stairs.

As soon as he hit the landing, he banged open the bathroom door and scrabbled for the light switch. The whole landing became visible, if dim: about fifteen feet of white walls and light brown carpeting, with a dark splooch creeping from the bottom of the bathroom door from the bathtub overflowing and flooding the room when he was six. The space was really more of a hallway, just a bit wider than the stairs, so that if Tucker stretched out his arms he could  _ just  _ leave fingerprints on both walls’ tidy wainscotting. He opened the other three nearest doors, flipping switches with blind, brusque efficiency. Finally, when the landing was fully (if not brightly) illuminated, he breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back on the closet door.

There was a girl at the other end of the hall.

Tucker would be pretty sure later that he yelped, but he didn’t actually hear it. She had blue hair in a dirty, tangled ponytail with pieces escaping. She was wearing all black clothes. At first she wasn’t quite looking at him, more down and to the right, but at his silent yell her head snapped up and she started toward him, movements too fluid, like a sped-up, grainy tape of someone walking underwater.

Tucker bolted for the stairs, but her course took her deceptively fast to cut him off. He scurried back to grab the doorknob of his room—hadn’t he just opened that door?—but it wouldn’t turn. Then he was backed into the wall with her feather-light hands on his shoulders and his inner monologue wasn’t doing anything but screaming.

“You have to remember,” she whispered. Her eyes were red-rimmed and impossibly angry. “You  _ need _ to remember me.”

From a few yards away one might almost mistake her for human, but this close Tucker could see how her ripped black jeans exposed too-pale flesh that bulged in a way he’d never seen on a human being. Her skin seemed to be almost  _ writhing,  _ a grotesque parody of life. “Uh, I…?” His voice cracked out a high-pitched whimper, and he swallowed laboriously. Apparently that wasn’t good enough, because she twitched impatiently and dropped her hands from his shoulders, pacing a few steps down the landing. She kept making bizarre, choked-off little noises in her throat. One hand slid  _ around,  _ not  _ through _ the air in a careless gesture that made Tucker’s stomach rebel. 

She dug her hands into her hair in frustration, fingers slipping through the strands, and Tucker couldn’t help but feel a spike of queasy sympathy despite his terror. “Uh...miss?” He licked his lips and swallowed more air down his dry throat. “Is there anything I can….”

Reality  _ bent.  _ Tucker scrambled to push himself backward through the wall as she whirled on him, loose strands of hair drifting gravity-free as the landing tilted wildly sideways. Colors screamed in fractured voices. The girl’s pale makeup cracked and flaked off piece by piece to reveal something terrible and... _ infested  _ underneath. And her voice

seemed to come from everywhere as she screamed

_ You _

_ will _

**_re_ **

**_m e m b e r_ **

**_me_ **

~(*0*)~

“–ctim’s name was Victor Schulker, a 46-year-old Canadian national stopping in Amity on his way to the Pere Marquette hunting grounds outside of St. Louis.”

Tucker was on the couch. Tucker was on the couch, and his eyes were open.

“Mr. Schulker had no close relatives, but coworkers at CrossHares Fishing and Game Store in Alberta were surprised and unnerved when notified of the incident by police.” Tucker was on the couch, and his ears hurt, and the TV display read three in the morning, and he didn’t remember going to sleep. Over a thin sound-blanket of static, a clock ticked loudly. From behind her desk, Tiffany Snow stared at the camera for a moment of bad editing, and then the box in the upper left-hand corner that had been displaying pictures of the victim, usually wearing camo and grinning over some gigantic fish, expanded to fill the screen.

In the slightly shaky video, a weedy-looking white guy with a brown goatee jumped as a microphone was shoved under his nose. “It’s just shocked all of us here,” he said, glancing into the camera and then looking away guiltily. Text at the bottom of the screen identified him as the manager of the CrossHares store where the victim had worked. “Victor wasn’t the friendliest guy, but we respected him, and he was a  _ damn  _ good hunter. Best I’ve ever seen. Never went anywhere without his rifle and a knife or two, either. Can’t imagine how someone was able to get the jump on him.” He shook his head, accent creeping more into his vowels as he got more affected. “What a waste.”

The screen shrunk back into a smaller box, once more giving Tiffany Snow center stage. “A waste indeed.” She gave Tucker soulful, sympathetic eyes for a second, then launched back into her lines, looking like a peppy shark with her slightly overlarge white teeth. “And thank you to the Alberta Inquirer for obtaining this interview for our viewers here in Amity. Now, according to the statement delivered by Police Commissioner Davis this morning, Mr. Schulker’s body was found early in the morning last Friday, September 13, in a dumpster behind the Pins and Needles Bowling Alley at the entrance to the Westside Mall. Police have been sitting on this situation for the last four days, but this morning they made the decision to ask the public for any information they might have.”

The corner box reabsorbed the whole screen, this time showing Amity’s harried police commissioner, sunlight gleaming off his bald head and the buttons on his formal uniform. He and six other officers were arrayed at the top of the Amity courthouse stairs, flanked by the columns that just a week ago (had it really only been a week?) Tristan and his friends had mentioned filming for their play. They cast long shadows over the men and women onstage. “We ask that anyone with information pertaining to this heinous act to call in to our tip-line immediately,” the commissioner rumbled. “We are doing the absolute utmost we can to protect the city we all love and ensure that you and your children are safe. No further questions.” The crowd of journalists, more than Tucker had ever seen in Amity before, erupted, shoving microphones and cameras in the faces of the unfortunate officers now struggling to edge their way down the marble steps.

The video minimized one last time to reveal Tiffany Snow positively beaming for an instant before she schooled her face into a more appropriately grave expression. Tucker could just see the reflection of his own terrified eyes superimposed on her smooth, poreless face. “There you have it. Don’t forget to call in any tips to the police–or, if you’d prefer, our own tip-line here at the Amity Local News” –she proceeded to rattle off a number, feral grin threatening the edges of her immaculately lipsticked mouth again– “and stay safe out there, Amity Park.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> idrk if its a common thing in malls, but those backdoor hallways are actually a thing at my mall that I discovered on a date and they're SUPER COOL and i really wanted to run down them a lot but he wanted to make out so eh :/


	5. The Hauntings of Tucker Foley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tucker hasn't associated with the paranormal all that much in his life. For a psychic resonator highly attuned to the presence of ectoenergy, he's really been slacking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter with the warning. It took a while because I was trying to deal sensitively with the content. Not that anything really bad actually HAPPENS–the most that happens is that a child is momentarily trapped in a room with an adult with bad intentions. The child never even realizes the danger. Totally T-rated. However, if you don't want to deal w that, it's not extremely important world-building; you can just skip to the first lil ghost (~(*0*)~) to avoid it entirely.

The Hauntings of Tucker Foley

_ or alternatively:  _ Sharp, Is What It Is

Tucker saw his first ghost when he was eight. This is how he remembers it.

_ He tore across the classroom with a yell, relishing the way the soles of his sneakers lit up bright red, blue, and green for all of his third grade classmates to see. That was his  _ ulterior _ motive for chasing Star; his pretense was that he was enraged at her for her attempt to deal a cowardly and dastardly blow to his grades. Just before, she’d drawn an ugly line in colored pencil across Tucker’s multiplication worksheet. Luckily, Tucker was good at multiplication, so her plan had failed miserably. Now Tucker just had to formulate his own plan for what to do if he caught her. _

_ Or...deal with that after lunch. The bell had just rung, signalling Tucker’s favorite time of day, and the assistant teacher was calling for him and Star to join the line. _

_ The hallway of Tucker’s elementary school was an ecosystem in its own right, a hectic breeding ground for all things colorful and unfamiliar. Posters upon posters upon crayon-drawings were tacked onto sagging corkboards, and the walls were a scratched-up but still pleasant shade of robin’s-egg blue. En route, Tucker got to peek into the classrooms of the older kids (in fifth grade they made dioramas, but you also had to learn the states, and all  _ fifty?!  _ Tucker could  _ never) _ and even passed Star going the other direction hand-in-hand with the assistant English teacher, heading toward where Tucker vaguely supposed the principal’s office was. Revenge was no longer warranted, then, and all was right in the universe. _

_ Most of the third graders’ still-anxious parents packed them lunch every day, but a few kids (mostly the ones with an older sibling or three) got the mini pizzas or mac and cheese or the occasional reviled vegetable, generally with a side of animal crackers and a choice of juice. For the sake of these exception students, the classes filed through a cafeteria room in rotating sections on their way to the outdoor lunch tables while the teachers leaned against the walls and gossiped. With so many kids in such a state of excitement (this far into most of their scholarly careers the joy of lunchtime remained undimmed, even though they did it every day), it was easy for someone to get lost in the commotion. Tucker pushed doggedly through the pulsing throng and was almost to the open door when a hand on his shoulder arrested his progress. _

_ Tucker’s whole body tingled. Like pins and needles, only more, like there were actual needles sliding and scraping downward just beneath his skin. He gasped and turned around quickly. _

_ One of the lunch ladies was bending over to talk to him. She wore a big pink dress and an apron, and her face had the appropriate friendly wrinkles Tucker had come to associate with grandmotherly warmth, but there was something in her eyes that unnerved him. They were strangely...empty. _

_ Her voice, though, was as smooth and buttery as the fake cheese on the cafeteria’s Kraft mac, and something about it put Tucker at ease. “Mr. Foley?” That was confusing because for a split second he looked around for his dad, but then as soon as he understood that  _ he _ was Mr. Foley, the title felt quite flattering. “Would you do me a favor, dear, and go fetch me another package of pepperoni from the freezer?” _

_ Tucker looked around, but none of the teachers seemed to have noticed them. “Um. Me?” He didn’t think a grown-up had ever asked him for anything besides, like, cleaning his room or times tables. _

_ She nodded seriously. “It’s quite urgent. Children need lots of protein for their developing brains. And it’s a bit heavy, so you should fetch a teacher to help get it down from the shelf. Would you do that for me, Tucker?” _

_ It was kind of cool to be given a mission like this. Like a real-life version of one of the cool older-kid video games Tucker’s cousins on his dad’s side were allowed to play. “Okay!” _

_ “What a gentleman.” She winked, jolly, but behind the sweep of short eyelashes her eye was glossy and fixed. The needles pricked more insistently at the inside of Tucker’s skin. _

_ But then she turned and headed back toward the lunch counter, and the feeling subsided and went dormant along with the part of Tucker that was questioning this situation. He ran over to Mr. Nguyen, his favorite science teacher (from last year, unfortunately. The current one had yelled at Sam for reading in class, so Tucker was her mortal enemy for life). “Mr. Nin? I need help.” _

_ He smiled and bent down a bit. “Sure, Tuck, what is it?” _

_ “I need to go to the freezer.” _

_ Mr. Nguyen’s smile got a little bit confused at the edges. Tucker clarified, “The lunch lady said they need more pepperoni? And she told me to get somebody to lift things.” _

_ Mr. Nguyen full-on frowned and straightened up to survey the aproned ladies behind the counter, in the process pulling his tie just a little bit further out of the clip halfway down his white dress shirt. “They shouldn’t...huh. Let me see about this.” _

_ He started to head for the counter, and Tucker panicked. He wouldn’t get to finish the quest! He grabbed for his teacher’s shirt. “She said it’s urgent. That means right now, right?” _

_ “Uh...yes.” Mr. Nguyen stared at the counter for another second, then shrugged. “Okay, Tuck, and you want to come with?” _

_ “Yeah!” _

_ Mr. Nguyen laughed and grabbed the attention of the Social Studies teacher, briefly notifying her of where he was going with Tucker and asking her to keep an eye on the second grade Section B for a few minutes. Then he pushed back through the door they’d come in from, holding it open so Tucker could follow. Older kids ambled around the hallways in messy lines, talking and laughing, and Tucker kept to the wall so as not to bump into them. He and his guide had to tromp a surprisingly long distance down the hall, actually past the third grade homeroom; Mr. Nguyen explained that they kept medicine stuff there too and needed to be close to the youngest kids. That the freezer was near Pre-K and the cafeteria was all the way past the fifth graders’ rooms was just bad planning. Heh, and some grown-up had made this all up? Tucker could architect better than that. _

_ At last, the threadbare brown carpet became somewhat grimy tile as they turned down a nondescript hallway on the left of the main thoroughfare. Before them loomed a giant set of shiny metal doors with fogged-up windows too high up for Tucker to see in anyways. To someone of Tucker’s slightly-above-four-foot stature, the doors loomed large as the gates to the underworld (though to say Tucker was pulling his mental image from a reliable source would be giving children’s book illustrators far too much credit). _

_ Mr. Nguyen strode up and pushed. “Huh. That’s weird.” He took a deep breath, set his shoulders, and pushed hard on the door on the right. There was a long, slow, screeching of metal. Cold air rolled over Tucker with a lazy, slow malevolence. Then, “What…?” _

_ The first thing Tucker saw was Star, kneeling on the ground next to a long metal shelf and examining the cans of tuna with great fascination. The assistant English teacher, Mr. Browning, was standing in the opposite corner, staring wide-eyed at the doors. _

_ Mr. Nguyen appeared, for a minute, as frozen as the canned fish. Tucker watched in confusion as his face darkened. Visibly. Tucker wouldn’t recognize the parallel until much later, but he looked almost as impossibly angry as the blue-haired girl on the landing. “Dave. Why was this door blocked.” It was not a question, and Mr. Nguyen didn’t give him a chance to answer. “It’s against school policy and a breach of contract for a teacher to be alone with a child at any point without notifying another teacher. Does someone else know you’re here?” _

_ Mr. Browning–Dave, apparently–swallowed and searched for words. Tucker could see visible spit hit the plastic-wrapped meat next to him as he sputtered, “I–of course–” _

_ “He said I could see where they kept the food!” Star piped up excitedly, blonde hair sticking up behind her headband. “We just got here. Tuck, you wanna see the cheese?” _

_ Tucker shrugged and went to join her, enmity forgotten. “Okay, but first I gotta get pepperoni for the lunch lady. It’s urgent, so I gotta do it right now.” _

_ He turned back toward where he’d seen the meat (Mr. Browning’s spit was freezing on it, ew), and almost bumped into Mr. Nguyen’s back. He was standing in the middle of the freezer, blocking Tucker’s view. “That’s okay, I’ll get the pepperoni later. Can you and Star get back to the cafeteria okay?” He paused, and Tucker figured he was considering that, although he couldn’t see his face. “Never mind, you guys just go into the room directly across the hall and get Ms. Holly. You know her, right, Tuck? She’ll take you back.” He dug his phone out of his back pocket without looking at it. _

_ Tucker frowned. “But she said urgent–” _

_ “Now, Tucker. Go with Star.” Tucker’s heart flip-flopped in surprise at the tone. _

_ Star was already out the open door. She shot Tucker a mischievous smile over her shoulder and revealed the can of frozen fish she had hidden in the folds of her dress. At least she had gotten something out of her trip all the way across the school. Tucker hadn’t completed his own mission, and he was starting to get really cold. He scowled and left with Star, but at the last minute his mom’s teachings on good manners struggled past his sullen mood. “Thanks, Mr. Nguyen. Bye, Mr. Browning.” _

_ Mr. Nguyen didn’t answer. He was dialling a number on his phone. Tucker followed a skipping Star across the hall to Ms. Holly’s room. Ms. Holly, the second grade teacher who also ran bi-monthly, barely-controlled art classes, gave them a weird, indecipherable look like Mr. Nguyen’s before stretching a cheerful smile over it and leading them back to the cafeteria. _

_ Tucker was worried the lunch ladies would be mad that he hadn’t completed his mission, but they were apparently doing okay serving lunch, and no one mentioned pepperoni to him again. He headed to his class’ tables and sat down with Mikey, bragged about seeing the freezer, rubbed the bone-deep chill out of his arms, and pretty soon forgot the whole incident. _

_ The next day was a Saturday, so he thought it was weird when his mom bundled him into the car after breakfast and headed to school, though he was reassured when she laughed and said no, she wasn’t making him do extra school on the weekend. The school was empty except for the janitor, who was listening to music on an iPod Touch. Lucky. Tucker’s mom led him with a warm hand on his back toward the principal’s office, which raised the hairs on the back of his neck again. The hallways seemed to narrow and darken, his breath sharpening in his throat. Was he in trouble so bad that they’d brought in the principal on a Saturday just for him?! _

_ No, his mom and Principal Tuhoe quickly assured him, he wasn’t in trouble. _

_ “In fact,” the principal continued, smiling in that way people smile at kids but with a hint of something else sharpening the indulgent edge, “you helped prevent something very bad.” He glanced at Tucker’s mom. Tucker’s mom shook her head. He looked confused. “Uh, Mrs. Foley, school policy would—but you’re choosing not to…?” _

_ She shook her head. “Later. Not...not just yet.” _

_ Mr. Tuhoe looked like Tucker’s teachers when someone played just a bit too violently with the Polly Pockets, but all he did was nod. “Tucker, we brought you in here because we were hoping you could identify the lady who sent you to the freezer. Do you think you could do that for me?” _

_ Could he? Tucker thought back to their meeting. An image jumped immediately to his mind: her face as she crouched down close to him, all friendly wrinkles framing empty eyes. A wave of chills, apparently left over from his time in the freezer, crawled up his spine. Yes, he would definitely recognize that face if he saw it again. He nodded with all the solemnity he could manage. _

_ “Okay, Tucker. Here’s the employees who were working in the cafeteria that day.” Mr. Tuhoe slid an open binder across the desk. Inside, a series of printed pages in plastic sleeves displayed (mostly) smiling pictures of women who looked vaguely familiar next to text providing their names, availability, and other information. Some of their pictures had been circled in red marker. Mr. Tuhoe leaned a bit over the desk as Tucker paged slowly through the binder, distracted by the way the plastic sleeves slithered across each other and stuck together due to the static cling. “Do you see the lady you met here? I circled the ones who should have been working that day.” _

_ Tucker made it all the way past the lunch ladies and through another ten or so staff members to the end of the binder, but he didn’t see anyone who even resembled her. He looked up and only then became aware of both his mom and the principal watching him closely, of the tension that had been building in the room. “She’s not there.” _

_ His mom leaned down over him to flip the binder back to the start. “Are you sure, baby? Could you look again?” _

_ Tucker obediently started again, rubbing the edges of the pages between his fingers to make sure two sleeves didn’t stick together anywhere, but again he came up empty. “Sorry, she really isn’t here.” _

_ His mom and the principal exchanged a loaded look (had he ever seen an adult look nervous like that before?). “Could you tell us what she looked like? And what she was wearing?” asked Mr. Tuhoe. _

_ “Uhh...she was a white lady, and real old….” The detail about how her eyes were weird didn’t seem like the kind of thing they were looking for, and mentioning her wrinkles would probably be rude and make his mom mad at him. “She had a pink dress and one of those—those hair thingies, the net thingies.” _

_ “That...doesn’t sound like anyone who’s worked here, at least while I’ve been here.” _

_ “So you have no idea who was in your school, talking to my child?!” Tucker’s mom was still leaning half-over him with a hand splayed out on the desk, but now her focus was on Mr. Tuhoe and the knuckles on that hand were pale. _

_ Mr. Tuhoe was moving a lot more than he had been when they’d entered, fidgeting with his hands on the desk as he leaned back a bit more in his chair. “I assure you, Mrs. Foley, the school is already in the midst of a thorough investigation. Mr. Browning will never work in education again—” _

_ “That’s it? That’s all that’s going to happen to him?!” Tucker, leaning into her warm side like this, could feel his mom shaking. _

_ “There’s nothing else we can do, Mrs. Foley, there’s no way to prove intent! We’ve put him on multiple watchlists for schools nationwide, but other than that we can’t…” He trailed off, rocking back and forth slightly in his chair. _

The school never released any sort of formal statement, and as far as Tucker knew none of those involved said much. Once Tucker was old enough to figure out what had really happened, he often wondered about Star: if she knew now, if she’d ever realized the danger, what she did with that can of tuna. They attended different middle schools, but now she went to high school with him, and he would pass her in the hall, or have her in his math class–he even participated in a group project with her once. And every time they made eye contact, he would wonder if there was some connection, a shared  _ something  _ that came from knowing a pseudo-secret no one else around them knew. He never asked. She never told.

So in the end, Tucker never got the answers he wanted, and the lunch lady never got her pepperoni.

~(*0*)~

The point is:

Tucker saw his first ghost when he was eight. In the intervening years he caught a few glimpses, got a few eerie vibes when expired consciousnesses fluttered briefly against his own, but the next ghost he really interacted with was the blue-haired girl.

So it seemed like a reasonable thing to assume that the cosmos had exhausted themselves with this new torture and the horror was over, for a while.

Nope.

On Wednesday, Tucker passed the blue-haired girl in the hallway between first and second periods. He didn’t even register it at first, then almost choked and whirled around, jostling several annoyed classmates unprepared for his sudden stop. She had already disappeared into the throng of students, leaving him unsure if he’d really seen her or if some sophomore had just entered her punk phase with a slightly bedraggled dye job.

One period later, Tucker was ten minutes into his Physics class, taking a bored stab at the example problem Mr. Marcel had just written on the board, when he felt a little trickle of nausea down the back of his throat. Someone near the back of the room snickered loudly, disturbing the quiet classroom. Tucker glanced over his shoulder and then immediately bolted out of his seat, banging his hip on the table and dropping his calculator with a clatter onto the floor. The blue-haired girl was sitting at a desk in the back corner, staring straight ahead at the board.

Tucker froze, watching her. She didn’t react, though other students were giving him weird looks. Mr. Marcel cleared his throat. “Tucker. Everything alright?”

Tucker didn’t take his eyes off the corner desk. “Uh—yeah, yeah.”

Mr. Marcel crooked an eyebrow. “Are you sick? You’re looking a bit off. Do you need to leave the room?”

The hallways were empty. Maybe she was in the classroom, but so were thirty other kids; the hallways were empty. “That’s—thanks, Mr. Mercer, but that’s okay. I’m okay. Thanks.”

“Are you sure? You look like you’ve seen a—”

“No, I’m great!”. He flashed his best charming  _ “hey there, ladies” _ grin. “Really. Peachy keen.”

Mr. Marcel’s eyebrow was on the verge of disappearing into his prominent forehead wrinkles. “Alllright then. Now, who can tell me about the work done on this structure? Mikey?”

While Mikey wrestled a somewhat strident but correct answer out around his new braces, Tucker slowly picked up his calculator and sat back down, still staring at the girl in the corner. She didn’t even glance at him, staying perfectly still with her eyes fixed somewhere beyond the whiteboard. Tucker turned to face it as well, then quickly glanced back, almost expecting her to have disappeared while he wasn’t looking.  _ Still there. _

“Tucker! Am I boring you with this?” Mr. Marcel was glaring at him, marker hovering above the whiteboard.

“Uh–no, no way. I swear, Mr. Marcel, physics is my passion and practically my sole reason for being.”

Mr. Marcel smiled reluctantly with one side of his mouth, and Tucker was again reminded of the value of doing his physics homework and bringing brownies to the teacher’s lounge every once in a while. “It’d better be. Now, I need everyone’s attention for this next part; you’ll probably need to know this for the AP test and I’m not going to cover it again before May.”

Tucker felt sick to his stomach; his uh-oh feeling was going full-force. He risked another quick glance over his shoulder.  _ Still there. _

It was like knowing there was a really big spider on your wall but not being able to squash it or leave the room–as a person with extreme arachnophobia. He couldn’t concentrate on anything but the violent pounding of his heart and the acute awareness of her proximity to him. Whenever he wasn’t looking at her, he could almost feel her coming closer, could picture her unfolding from the desk and doing that jerky and yet somehow too-smooth walk forward to breathe down the back of his neck...and then he turned around, and she hadn’t moved. Not a muscle, or whatever hid under her skin. So he would reluctantly turn back to the board for as long as he dared, and then the cycle repeated. She only moved once in the full 35 minutes of class time: Five minutes before the bell, he looked back and caught her chewing slowly and deliberately on a pencil. Gleaming spit was visible on it from where he sat. She still wasn’t looking at him.

When the bell rang, Tucker leapt out of his seat with only slightly more alacrity than everyone else in the class. He looked down for just a fraction of a panicky second to shove his notebook in his backpack (he hadn’t taken any notes) and violently jerk the stubborn zippers closed. When he looked back at the corner desk, it was empty. He scanned the room. She was nowhere to be seen.

Only then did he notice the maimed yellow pencil sitting innocuously on his desk, two feet from his face.

Backpack over one shoulder, Tucker sprinted out the door and down the hall to his locker, turning sideways to slip between the wall and the edge of the passing period crowd. Sam was at her own locker already–the one next to his. Thank  _ God.  _ He banged into the lockers and slid halfway down, trying to calm his ragged breathing.

Sam jumped at his sudden entrance, then immediately slammed her locker shut. “Oh my God, Tucker, what happened?”

Sam would freak out if he told her. She’d call it a hallucination and might even tell his parents if she was really worried. “Nothing. Just didn’t realize there was someone behind me and got jumpscared. It was nothing.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, fighting the backpack strap still hanging over one elbow, and then quickly tore them away again to glance both ways down the hallway.

“Tucker, if Dash or somebody  _ did _ something–” Her face was murderous.

“Nonono, I swear! I would tell you. I just got freaked out. It was dumb.”

“Okay, Tuck….” He could tell she was unconvinced. “Just...remember, my parents are major donors, okay? If we need to try to get my mom involved, or forge something from her or  _ whatever  _ we need to do, we can do that. Anytime.”

“Yeah, I know. I swear, it wasn’t anything bad.” Slowly, he stood up and managed to calm his ragged breathing, tearing his eyes from the hall long enough to input his locker combination. “What do we have next, English?”

He didn’t see the blue-haired girl again that day. Maybe she could only appear for so long, or maybe she’d filled her daily haunting quota or something. Still, not seeing her didn’t exactly help his nerves; he was jumpy enough in English that Danny kept giving him weird looks and, albeit jokingly, asked him after class if he was okay. When he got home, he finished all his homework downstairs with his mom in the kitchen (she’d taken a sick day) and then reaped the rewards of leaving on all the lights in the upstairs rooms that morning, with the doors open so he could sprint up the stairs and straight to his bed, polar bears be damned. He left the light on in his room all night. He barely even dozed. On Thursday, he was possibly even more on edge because if she showed up three days in a row, then that was a pattern, and he didn’t know how long he could  _ function  _ like this.

And luckily, the blue-haired girl didn’t show up on Thursday.

No, on Thursday, September 19th, Tucker met the hunter.

  
  



	6. Baader-Meinhof Blues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The title refers to the psychological phenomenon, not the German terrorist group. The psychological phenomenon Tucker definitely isn't experiencing here, unfortunately. Meanwhile, Sam is bored, and that never results in good decisions.

Baader-Meinhof Blues

 _or alternatively:_ Sleepless in Illinois

Tucker edged warily into the school two minutes before the bell after a somewhat-more-silent-than-usual (but still life-threatening to the usual degree) carpool ride with Sam. Sam wasn’t the most empathetic individual in most of the rooms she’d ever been in, but she could definitely tell how exhausted he was. A feral mongoose could probably tell how exhausted he was. Or, like, a sociopath. Tucker’s analogies tended to break down a bit after what was essentially two all-nighters in a row. Hey, at least he’d been able to do all his homework for the past two days quick-and-crappy at 2 a.m. as a distraction. God, he was really brought low if he was using _French syntax worksheets_ as a coping mechanism.

Sam had to run across campus for World History first period, so Tucker was on his own for the next few minutes. Joy. At least the hallway wasn’t empty.

He napped through the documentary they were watching in French–for once Danny wasn’t the only one conked out on his desk–and made it through the settlement of Jamestown unscathed in his U.S. History class. Halfway through CompSci, though, he realized with mounting horror that he very much needed to use the restroom.

Reluctantly, he ducked out of the class.

The hallway was empty. His sneakers squeaked slightly on the tile floor, mingling with the vague mumbling of a hundred voices that slid sibilantly around or rumbled through most of the closed classroom doors he passed. He was almost to the bathroom, with no sign of anything out of the ordinary, when out of nowhere a flash of movement–at his _feet, too close!_ The grey fox wound around his legs, making him jump and swear. Tucker tore into the bathroom and pulled the door closed behind him, then ran to put his back to the opposite wall, heart pounding.

Only then did Tucker realize what a series of terrible decisions that had been, because the bathroom was dark, and he had a _very bad feeling._ It was _frigid_ in the bathroom. And this time, no other fancy feelings came to Tucker. Just cold, and dread.

Tucker looked to his left and came face-to-face with a man in the mirror.

And it probably spoke volumes about the state he was in that his first half-hysterical thought was the first few bars of the chorus to Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” as the man grunted, “Hey. Kid.”

 _I’m starting with the man, in, the mirror._ He was wearing fatigues. Hunter’s fatigues.

 _I’m asking him to chaaange his wayyys._ Behind his beard, his lips were chapped and cracked. The worst Tucker had ever seen.

 _And no message, could’ve been aaany clearer._ “Kid, I’ll admit, I ain’t never been very good at tracking. Usually I’ll just go wandering through the forest, quiet as a mouse, until I find my quarry’s done showed up right under my nose.” His voice was deep, husky and as cracked as his lips. He wasn’t old, maybe in his forties. His hair was mid-length, black and greasy.

 _If you wanna make the world, a better place–_ He lifted a finger and somehow, impossibly, started to write on the condensation on the mirror. The condensation caused by Tucker’s own warm breath. He noticed in a detached way that he could actually see his breath, misting out in shallow puffs between them. The hunter’s fingernails were cut short and visibly blue, with half-moons of dirt under the nails and cuticles.

_Take a look at yourself_

A series of symbols now stretched across the glass–thick lines just starting to drip.

_And make a_

The hunter grinned; there was dirt between his teeth. “Gimme a call, kid. Whenever you’re ready.” He turned and walked to the right, passing through two more mirrors and out the reflected door.

Tucker snapped out of his daze in time to feel his legs buckling beneath him but not in time to stop them. At the last moment he clutched at the sink with both arms, stopping himself before he could crash backward into one of the stalls. He clung there for a minute, breathing heavily, frantically, thinking _this must be how a rabbit feels when the mountain lion passes by._ And about how rabbits, more easily than almost any other animal, can actually die of fright.

He pulled himself up. With shaking hands, he fumbled his phone out of his pocket and snapped a picture of the symbols on the mirror. Even in the photo, they showed up, clear as day.

Then Tucker sprinted out of the bathroom, letting the door bang shut behind him, and all the way to the school office. The secretary looked up, surprised; he could see the concern and alarm rush to the surface and leak out along the lines of her face the moment she registered him. “Oh, no, honey, what’s wrong?”

“I need to go home.”

“Are you sick? Do you need the nurse?”

“Uh–yeah. No, I mean–I don’t need the nurse, I just–can I call my mom?”

“Of course, hon.” She looked a little helpless, and only then did Tucker notice the tears in his eyes. He swallowed down a sob and turned away, though she’d obviously noticed. She paused for a second. “I’m going to go get you a glass of water, okay? I’ll be right back. Go ahead and call your mom.” She headed into the next room as Tucker sat down and choked on the thickness in his throat while he unlocked his phone. It took two tries to dial. “Mom? I’m sorry, I know you’re at work….”

“It’s okay, what is it, baby?” She’d definitely picked up on the hoarseness in his voice. And he was alone in the office. Tucker let his breath hitch. “I just–I need to come home.”

Twenty minutes later the paranormal had officially won: Tucker’s mom got to Casper High and drove him home.

~(*0*)~

On Friday, September 20, Sam was hella bored.

Tucker had texted her saying he was home sick, so there was no one to complain about Sam’s death metal playlist or apologize to other motorists for her driving on the way to school. She actually ended up driving relatively safely without the added incentive to cut people off. _Sam,_ obeying the speed limit! She might as well tattoo “conformist” on her forehead. Go all-in with a full-shaved-head portrait of Ronald Reagan.

Actually, that could be kind of cool, as sort of an ironic surrealist statement. Sam filed the idea away for future reference.

Anyway, the point is, she was bored.

So when she texted Danny at lunch “hey wya” and he responded “running late srry :/” just as she pushed through the doors to the cafeteria and spotted him hurrying out the other entrance, still looking at his phone...well, let’s just say Sam was born without the instinct to leave well enough alone.

And she had _reason_ to be curious! She’d asked Danny what he did when he disappeared (almost immediately after they’d started hanging out, and in MUN so Tucker wasn’t there; Tucker got shy about the weirdest things) and he’d categorically denied doing anything besides what he told the teachers he was doing. He’d been phasing out the bathroom excuse, so that was usually “getting water.” For ten minutes on average. She’d told him she didn’t care if he did anything illegal and would probably respect him more if he did. She’d told him she wouldn’t judge him if it was embarrassing and shared about her middle school collection of Goth-ified Barbies and Kens to prove it. He’d maintained his denial, and gotten all twitchy about it, too. “I just drink a lot of water!” he’d insisted in a hushed voice as the kid at the front of the room droned on about either parliamentary procedure or Venezuelan healthcare.

Now, Danny walked back into the school. Sam let the heavy doors swing closed behind her and followed.

He was moving _fast_ under that big backpack. Something drifted down the hallway after him, briefly, almost invisibly; she stumbled straight into a haze in the air that dissipated in little midair whirlpools upon her intrusion. Was he smoking? If so, then why hadn’t she seen anything in his hand or mouth? And why did it smell like _nothing?_

She scrambled around three freshmen gabbing by the water fountain (a process that involved bumping painfully into the glass case with a fireman’s axe and fire extinguisher projecting from the opposite wall)  in time to catch a last glimpse of the backpack’s many zippers disappearing into a supply closet. The door banged shut audibly; two of the freshman shot it weirded-out glances before continuing to discuss the latest bio test, which Sam gathered had them all righteously appalled.

Here was a conundrum. Sam hadn’t eaten lunch yet, and she’d rather not eat her vegetable fried rice soggy and cold when there was a school microwave available in the cafeteria. However, if she left she might never find out what about Danny was so _off._ So it came down to a question of which was stronger: her hunger for secrets, or her hunger for dehydrated carrot bits in a soy sauce reduction?

The carrot bits won out. Sam headed back to the cafeteria with only minor reluctance.

There was, as usual, a line for the microwave. Sam and a powerful coalition of the kids with weird allergies had fought the school for that goddamn microwave for months, and of course this was how it repaid her. It was located on its own table under the southern windows; Sam tapped one combat boot the whole time and glared down the scrawny little sophomore who dared to raise an annoyed eyebrow at the noise. He scurried away with his head down low over his steaming (to a completely unnecessary degree–he could have taken a minute off of that cook time) gluten-free pasta. Finally, her turn had arrived. She cranked the dial and waited impatiently for the wonders of modern technology to be _over with._

Two minutes later, freshly armed with a hot plate of rice and a refilled Hydroflask, Sam clomped urgently back to the school proper. She tried taking a few clumsy bites as she walked, but what with the canteen in one hand and the backpack weighing her down she soon gave up the attempt.

The hallway was in the process of emptying. She passed the three freshman girls, the entire math club, and Danny on their way out. Danny was hanging his head low and looking generally exhausted. He noticed her a few feet away and paused, leaning too-casually on one pockmarked yellow wall and mustering a smile. “Hey, Sam! You heading to the cafeteria?”

She smiled back, equally forced. “I gotta stop in the bathroom real quick, I’ll meet you there in a minute.”

“Alright, see you.” He trudged out, snaking around the math club to escape into the sunlight she’d just left behind.

She really would join him in a minute. But first, she checked up and down the hallway and then tried the handle on the door Danny had disappeared behind earlier, labelled “JANITOR’S CLOSET” by a sad little nameplate of fake mahogany that slanted diagonally from its only remaining screw.

It was locked. Probably automatically. _Hmm._

Well, the area was still empty of teachers _and_ known snitches. Sam pulled two bobby pins out of her half-up ponytail and got to work.

The door was a pretty easy pick, and it wasn’t even alarmed! (Which was good, because she didn’t even consider that possibility until she was already turning the handle.) Inside was….

A janitor’s supply closet.

Sam supposed it was about what she’d expected: beige walls with the frequency of unidentifiable stains increasing near the floor, a vent in the ceiling since there were chemicals in storage, one of those big yellow cart-buckets giving a chemical bath to a mop, and a shelving system supporting various cleaning supplies, rat traps, and a black binder that teetered off one edge. It was a bit roomier than she’d expected. She flipped flippantly through the binder, but it was just an index for the contents of the shelves.

Everything you’d expect to find in a janitor’s closet was there, but one thing was missing: it didn’t smell like smoke.

There was no way it could have dissipated that quickly. And for another thing, there was a green-blinking smoke alarm clearly visible next to the vent! So Danny hadn’t been smoking. But then why the hell has he been in there?! He could’ve been crying, but it really hadn’t looked like it when he’d passed her in the hallway. He could’ve been napping, but he’d already demonstrated that he could and would do that pretty much anywhere. What did that leave? Stealing cleaning chemicals?

The janitor’s closet held a lot of mousetraps and 409, but no answers. She glared for a minute at the mop, and then left it behind, carrying her fried rice and her questions with her.

She didn’t like the closet, anyway. It gave her a weird feeling, like cold fingers at the base of her spine. _Must be the Windex fumes._

~(*0*)~

After dinner, which was abnormally quiet probably so his parents could devote all their energy to giving him intermittent sympathetic looks, Tucker sat on the couch and toyed with his PDA while his dad read the newspaper next to him. His online friends were active tonight. _“@tkfire u live in illinois right?”_ asked a guy who said his name was Jeff, although his username on this particular forum was “bootyslayer420.” Tucker was not positive it was meant to be ironic. Tucker’s thumbs hovered over the screen for a second before he answered.

_“@bootyslayer420 yeah why?”_

_“@tkfire u anywhere near this whole serial killer case?”_

Tucker drew his hands back as if the PDA had started spitting out sparks uncontrollably (again). He considered, tongue playing with the backs of his incisors. Then, palms sweaty, he avoided the question. _“@bootyslayer420 y do u know about that? its not national news or anything”_

Another user, purportedly hailing from the UAE with the username “proud2bweeb,” piled on. _“@bootyslayer420 ya why r u so interested in this u creep!! [laughing emoji]”_

_“@proud2bweeb **** off, its interesting @tkfire so do u live near chicago? or amity?”_

_“@bootyslayer420 lol u literally just revealed ur a serial killer groupie, now is not the time to ask where he lives...”_

Tucker sent a brief note of agreement and then closed out to let proud2bweeb fight his battles for him.

He browsed drowsily through Netflix for a while (yes, his PDA had Netflix. Sheryl was perfect) but didn’t find anything of interest. Finally, having thoroughly exhausted his digital entertainment options, he glanced at the front page of his dad’s open newspaper.

And it wasn’t really surprise he experienced, more a dread-filled leaden weariness that sank stinging into his gut, when he saw the picture next to the bottom article, and the picture was of the blue-haired girl. Because yeah, duh, of course it was Amber McClain. That didn’t mean he hadn’t wished with all his willpower that it wasn’t. That this would stop coming up in every area, every _moment_ of his life. That he could escape this, somehow.

Leaning forward and ignoring the way the slight movements of his dad’s hands rippled the paper, he skimmed the article. “The Amity police have been comparatively liberal with details, leading some to question their…” “...modus operandi appears to have changed. After the third victim, Ainara…” “...multiple stab wounds to the throat and chest, leading some investigators to question…” “...Amber McClain, 21, a graduate of Casper Williamson High School…” “...parents declined to comment.”

Tucker slumped back into the couch for a second, feeling numb. His fingertips were tingling. Slowly, he reached for the PDA he’d left beside him and searched “Victor Schulker.” The man in the picture–the same picture shown on the 3 a.m. news, he remembered now–was younger, and cleaner, but he had the same dark beard and chapped lips as the thing in the mirror that morning.

At least now Tucker knew more of what he was up against. He opened his messages with Sam and typed one sentence, then stared at it for a minute before one thumb-tap sent it off.

It read, “i need u to help me summon a ghost.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey sorry college apps, also if anyone wants to read the short, weird thousand-word piece about a Roman gladiator and his odd relationship with the coliseum graffiti that i wrote last week when i COULD have been finishing this, hmu hehe. sorry this chapter's short; THAT at least was just a result of bad outlining.  
> And tucker's finally traumatized enough that i can move along w the actual plot yay! im so bored of the ghost encounters but i couldn't really spread them out in any way, cus of the story :/


	7. Hello, Operator

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tucker and Sam summon more than they bargained for and get answers, but not the ones they wanted.

Hello, Operator

 _or alternatively:_ Phone Tag

“So is there a _reason_ you’re suddenly desperate to summon something that doesn’t exist, or are you just getting into the Mabon spirit?”

Sam was leaning against the doorframe, swinging her key ring on one finger when he answered the door (bell rung about six times in the 40 seconds it took him to get there). It was dark out, and the streetlight in front of his house flashed a pale orange off the wings of tiny bugs whirling in enthralled, erratic circles below it.

“Uh, the first one,” Tucker responded. “What’s Mabon?”

“Pagan harvest festival. It goes through, like, the 28th I think?” She paused, glaring at the clouded-over sky as she tried to remember. One star peeked out a hand’s span above the horizon. “It’s around the autumnal equinox, celebrating the last light before the coming dark of winter. The druids offered, like, food and stuff to trees for the Green Man, and Wiccans celebrate the Goddess moving from Mother to Crone and the God preparing for death and rebirth.”

“Huh. Uncomfortably auspicious.”

“Yep!” She scrunched up the edge of the welcome mat with one black skater shoe. “So, uh…I’ll do this if you want me to, but you know it’s not going to work, right?”

And there it was. Tucker groaned internally. “Can you just do this for me? Please? I won’t push or anything if it doesn’t work. Just do this for me _once,_ and I won’t bug you again.”

The lines around Sam’s mouth relaxed a bit. “Yeah, okay. Of course.”

“Thanks.”

They stood there, slightly smiling, for a second of perfect mutual understanding. Then apparently something occurred to her, and Sam’s smile widened in a way that boded extremely ill. “But you have to do one thing.”

Tucker narrowed his eyes. “...What?”

“Go vegetarian for a week.”

Tucker groaned. “For real, Sam? I thought we had a moment there!”

“One week, Tuck! It’s healthier anyway.”

“Ugh, fine. Deal.”

Sam grinned and flipped some short hairs over her shoulder with a victorious air. “Okay! Do you have, like, a clear ground area? Maybe five feet square?”

“I can move the rug out of my room.”

She considered. “That should work. Okay, I need you to help me get a bunch of stuff out of my car.”

The stuff in Sam’s car turned out to be a pile of white candles, incense (sandalwood), a single lemon, and a thermometer, in addition to a bar of what Sam called “spirit chalk.” Apparently she’d dug around in her closet and found a leftover half-bar that she bought during her goth phase from “some middle-aged crystal mom on Ebay.” “It’s just salt and chalk, I think. And maybe crushed wolfsbane or something else suitably bullshitty,” she explained.

Then, desperately juggling his armful of candles, Tucker followed her up into his room, where they rolled up his round carpet and shoved it in a corner. Sam unpeeled the rest of the label from her stub of spirit chalk and started drawing in bold lines on his worn wood floor.

“This is the fifth pentacle of Mercury, from the _Key of Solomon the King_ . It’s supposed to just open all doors as well as removing obstacles, in the _figurative_ sense, but I’m treating it as a traditional summoning circle instead of a seal by not doing it on paper and adding a Triangle of Solomon for conjuring. Ugh, I really should’ve done this on a Wednesday.”

“Uh...will it not work since it’s not Wednesday?”

Sam didn’t answer, intent on transcribing some tricky symbols around the triangle she’d placed on one end after consulting the compass on her phone. “We stand in the circle, and whatever you conjure supposedly appears in the triangle. So do you know who you want to summon?”

Tucker shifted and stuffed his hands in his pockets, feeling awkward standing against the wall while she crawled around on the floor doing all the work. He did _not_ want to tell her he was summoning one of the murder victims after her earlier eagerness to investigate; it would only encourage her. “...No, but—”

She looked up to glare at him. “For real?”

“I have these symbols! I think they’re like a phone number.” He pulled up the picture on his phone.

She took it and crooked an eyebrow. “Huh, these look like Nordic runes. All right, I guess I can throw these in.”

“I feel like that’s weird though, right? Like, those are only five symbols, I think that’s a couple thousand permutations if you allow repetition? There have to be way more dead people than that.”

Sam hummed agreement and continued sketching. Tucker, bouncing a little with nervous energy, grabbed for his phone in his pocket, then realized Sam still had it and stepped carefully around her drawing to get to the laptop on his desk. “Okay, so this article is saying about a hundred billion people have died since the emergence of the species. And there are...24 runes in the ‘Elder Foo-thark,’ or whatever, which is the proto-Norse runic alphabet.” The sound of keys clacking furiously overlapped with the sound of breathing and the gentle scraping of Sam’s chalk on the floor. “So that’s 5,100,480 permutations, if you allow repetition. Wayyyy less than there are dead people.” He took off his hat and played with the brim, swiveling toward her in his chair. “I guess they don’t all have to be five runes long. Or maybe intention matters?”

Sam grunted. The thing on his floor was getting increasingly complicated. There were three circles around the outside, with some phrases that looked vaguely like Hebrew but could also be a lot of other languages, and a sort of grid-like thing in the middle along with the ghost in the bathroom’s—Victor Schulker’s, and somehow it was a lot more disturbing to think of it that way—symbols. On one end there was a pretty hefty triangle, big enough to hold about three standing people comfortably.

Tucker’s voice sounded loud in his own ears. He pulled his hat back on extra snugly. “Isn’t there supposed to be an upside down star in the middle? A pentagram, right?”

Sam snorted. “Upside down? Buddy, we’re not trying to summon Satan here.” She straightened up, brushing chalk off of her hands. “Okay, so we need to put all the candles equidistant around the edge, then light the incense. The thermometer can go anywhere.”

Tucker grabbed three candles from where he’d dropped them by the door. “Why the thermometer?”

“Fifth pentacle of _mercury._ It’s supposed to help if you have the metal nearby.”

Huh. He’d been pretty sure she’d brought the thermometer just to screw with him, but that sounded reasonably occult-y. “And the lemon?”

She paused in setting a candle down to wink at him cheekily. “You’ll see.” Okay, so she was at least partially screwing with him, which he guessed was to be expected.

They finished setting out the candles, and then she instructed Tucker to light them while she tapped something into her phone. Wow, okay, this was actually happening. He stood from the last candle, wringing his hands. He was nervous, but not as much as he’d anticipated. Something about Sam made it a lot harder to be scared when she was there. As a goth-turned-punk, she’d probably resent that if he told her.

Sam scrolled down on her phone. “Oh, right, and if at any point you have any doubts about the identity of the spirit we’re summoning, we need to terminate contact immediately,” she mentioned offhand, in the tone of someone reciting from a truly stultifying textbook.

“Wait, what?”

“Yeah, that’s a thing they say. There’s a chance whatever you summon won’t be who or what it represents itself to be.”

“That’s...horrifying.”

“It’s not _real,_ Tuck.”

“It really, really is.”

“Are we doing this?”

“Okay! Yes! Just say the evocation already!”

“It’s a versicle. Oh wait, I probably need an evocation too…”

“I thought you knew how to do this!”

“I learned magic from the internet, what do you expect?”

“So we’re doing, like, a lot of things wrong.” A sneaking suspicion slithered around his chest. “Sam, are you actually trying to make this work?”

She gave him a _look,_ then sighed at length, with the air of a college professor with multiple PhDs teaching remedial chemistry to undergrads. “Okay. So there’s eighty million ways to summon a ghost on the internet, and way more off of it. Almost every culture with a belief in the afterlife or spirits or powers of some sort has a way to summon the dead. The only real common thread through most of them is belief: you have to really, earnestly believe you’re about to summon something. And, remember, I _did,_ and it still didn’t work for me. But anyway, one of my favorite blogs talked about how this belief, channelled through any kind of symbolic, spiritually resonant objects, is the only thing that really matters, so I got a bunch of the objects and associated processes I liked most and combined them. Once this fails, if you want to do some in-depth historical research and go one-by-one, by-the-book through all of the million distinct summoning processes that have ever existed, be my guest–I tried it, and it wasn’t exactly a party. For now, I’m going to do what’s most familiar.”

“Okay, jeez, sorry. I will follow your lead, Sensei.”

“And that’s two weeks you owe me now.”

Tucker mustered a theatrical gasp, more for his own benefit than anyone else’s. _“Two weeks?!_ I’ll die of malnutrition!”

She sniffed. “If you died of two weeks without meat I wouldn’t even bother trying to summon you. You’d make a pretty pathetic ghost.”

Tucker scowled. “Say that again when I’m haunting you. And I can confirm that that is _not fun!”_ Sam kicked him in the shin and stole his desk chair, logging into his laptop with the password he very much did not remember telling her (“tuck.is.da.man69420”).

So they took a five minute break for Sam to find a decent evocation on the internet, during which she made him check over her runes–apparently they had a lot of common lines and were easy to get mixed up. Tucker had no idea what her standards were for a “good” evocation, and he didn’t ask.

Finally, she made an approving noise and motioned for him to step into the circle. She walked to the door and, though he’d known it was coming, his heart still jolted up into his lungs when she flipped off the light that had been left on for a solid three days. Tucker imagined the overheated bulb and wiring gasping in relief. Sam stepped into the circle and grabbed his clammy right hand with her own much drier left one, turning them both to face the triangle. He noticed that her right hand was holding the lemon. As she started to chant, all the ghost stories that had ever terrified him as a kid flashed through his head. He really wished he’d remembered to bring extra salt. It was right downstairs, in the pantry, he could just….

Sam was finishing the versicle and moving on to the evocation. “...ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in….” Her voice shifted, got perceptibly deeper. “Papa Legba, Saint Peter, Hermanubis, Keeper of the Gate, Lord of Hidden Road Between Life and Death, I call on you. Hermanubis, I summon you. A follower of the Old Ways calls out to you. Open the gate between the realm of the Living and the realm of the Dead for I would traffick with the peac–” –she caught and corrected herself– “the departed.”

The room was silent. Tucker realized he was holding Sam’s hand way too tightly, although she hadn’t said anything about it. His other hand’s sweaty fingers trembled and writhed against each other. He was suddenly aware of the silence–no wind outside–and his exposed neck.

They stood there for thirty seconds. Then a minute. Then Sam, who’d been getting visibly impatient, sniffed the air. “Tucker, did you leave the stove on? I think I smell gas.”

Tucker sniffed. There was a weird smell, sliding around and under the heady scent of incense. It was sour; otherwise, he couldn’t place it. He turned to face her. “I don’t think–”

There was a deafening sound, like boots crunching shards of broken glass but multiplied by a thousand. The world spun and shifted; both of them staggered. The candles ceased producing light. Tucker’s heart rate accelerated into hummingbird territory, and then he noticed that there was someone standing in the triangle.

Sam saw it too. Her eyes widened to an almost unnatural degree. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit–” She took one quick step backward, and Tucker panicked and yanked her hand _hard_ to keep her in the circle.

The person in the triangle was hard to make out. It looked vaguely male in a square sort of way, and it wasn’t tall; it might have actually been shorter than Tucker if it were standing on the ground. There was a vague suggestion of white drifting around its head, and darkness below. As Tucker watched, features began to become more distinct–the shadow resolved itself into a black shirt and...maybe jeans? The face was still an amorphous shadow, but Tucker thought he saw two flashes of green and a wide, wide black mouth underneath.

The thing cocked its head, then spun in a quick circle in the air, moving like a swimmer underwater. It hit the ground with an actual audible thump. It was at this point that Tucker stopped considering the way that side of the room was weirdly visible, the broken gadgets on his dresser casting knife-sharp shadows as if the thing itself was generating light—would that be abioluminescence? Necroluminescence?—and remembered that they’d set out to catch a _specific_ specter, and this was almost definitely not it. It wasn’t even pretending. And then he remembered what Sam had said about if the thing you summon isn’t who you wanted, and he swallowed a yelp so that it came out a little strangled noise in his throat.

“Sam.” He grasped her hand harder, shaking it between them. “Sam, it’s the wrong–it’s the wrong thing I don’t know how to get rid of it please _Sam please–”_ He groped with his left hand for her shoulder, not daring to look away from the thing in the triangle, which had turned to face them and that was almost definitely a mouth. “ _Sam! You have to get rid of it NOW!”_

Sam didn’t respond to his shaking. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth kept moving, but almost no sound came out. She’d abandoned her “Oh, shit” mantra. Leaning in, Tucker caught only one whispered word: _“Unreal…”_

The thing in the triangle put one hand (or something that could have been a hand or could have been streaks of pale greenish-white paint) up and forward until it hit some sort of invisible barrier extending from the chalk line on the floor. It raised its other fist and banged once, and the barrier _gave_ a little bit before rebounding back inward. And then it went crazy, pinballing off the walls in a flurry of streaking motion until the invisible barrier was made visible as a prism of furious shadows. The dim light from that side of the room flickered and whirled as if the actual air was boiling. Tucker found that he was hyperventilating, which was unhelpful. Instead he tried desperately to remember the names Sam had said in the evocation. “ _Hammurabi! Saint Peter, whoever the–you need to close the gate, please please please listen to me you need to close the FUCKING GATE!”_

In an instant, the it resolved itself again into the short light-haired boy-shape. It made a noise, a grating staticky gurgle that reminded Tucker a little bit of the crunching-glass sound that had accompanied its summoning, but somehow more–pained?

Then the thing in the triangle crumpled to its knees. Its shoulders heaved, and it made the glass sound again, almost like it was...retching. It swayed, and then it fell over on its side, curling in a loose heap on the floor.

Huh. Not exactly what Tucker had been going for, but he wasn’t one to kick a gift horse in the teeth. He directed his gaze tentatively upward. “Uhh, thanks? Saint Peter? Anubis, whoever? Yeah…sorry I swore at you… ” Was it _dead?_ _What do you even do with a dead ghost?_

Slowly, a gray-blue mist seeped out from around where its mouth and nose (did it have a nose?) seemed to be. It started in little rivulets, and it built against the barrier until there was a growing mound of greyish smoke writhing upward, more and more until it completely obscured the dark, slumped shape behind it. Tucker’s hair follicles stood back on end. Now this particular flavor of terror he knew. It was the creeping stomach-deep rabbit-dread, the bone-deep knowledge of one’s unfavorable position on the food chain. The instinctive understanding of an apex predator.

The mist resolved itself into something resembling Schulker. He looked the same as he had in the mirror that day, scruffier and dirtier than his pictures. He smiled, and Tucker could see the dirt in his teeth and his beard, and the way his lips cracked as they stretched, opening up old scabs and sores. He looked a lot more human than the thing on the ground behind him. “Hey, kid. You called. Now we can talk for real.”

Tucker licked his own dry lips. “Thank–” His voice broke. He coughed and continued, shaky. “Thank you for coming. Did you–what do you want to tell me? Are you, I mean are you gonna tell me who–” Again, his voice cracked high and dwindled, and he lapsed into silence.

The ghost chuckled. The room temperature dropped a few degrees, and Tucker became aware of how tall Schulker was. His head almost scraped the ceiling. He _loomed,_ and even in the dim light of the room his shadow seemed to project huge on all four walls. “Ya know, kid, that would be–” He cut off, suddenly frowning. His eyes widened. Tucker and he looked down at the same time.

Four greenish-white bands clutched tight around his ankle. Schulker only had time to growl once, an animalistic sound that made every muscle in Tucker’s body tense for flight. Then he dissolved back into mist and dissipated into nothing as the thing that had appeared first dragged itself to its feet.

Green eyes bored his. That long mouth opened, and it spoke. _“You will not do this again.”_ The voice carried undertones of static that made every hair on Tucker’s body rise Ben Franklin-with-kite style. It was like listening to the feeling of chewing on tinfoil.

It took one step forward and _pushed_ on the barrier. _“You’re gonna erase this figure, you’re gonna throw away that chalk and that stupid thermometer, and you’re gonna go home and live nice, happy, long lives and never mess with this shit again, ‘cause this shit will_ kill _you, okay?”_ It took a step forward, and Tucker could tell that the barrier stretched. _“You’re lucky I was here.”_ It had one foot almost over the chalk line. _“You could very easily have died right here, right now.”_ It was an _inch_ from entering the circle. “ _You still could.”_

And at that moment, Sam came back online. “I banish you from this space and this realm!” she screamed hoarsely. “Return from whence you came and trouble the Living no more!"

The thing cocked its head. _“Now that’s just rude.”_

 _“I banish you from this space and this realm!”_ She wrenched her hand from Tucker’s and shoved it into her pocket, pulling out what looked like some kind of herb. “Return from whence you came and trouble the Living no more!"

The thing took another floating step forward, more cautious. _“Do you really think some dime store exorcism’s gonna….”_

Sam threw the herb; Tucker watched, transfixed, as bits of leaf floated to the ground, glimmering silver in the light the thing cast. _“I banish you from this space and this realm! Return from whence you came and trouble the Living no more! Papa Legba, Saint Peter, Hermanubis,_ **_close the gate!!"_ **

There was no crunching glass sound this time. Just a flash of white light and a quiet, diminishingly staticky **_“Oh_ ** _h_ , _sh_ it.”

Tucker squinted through the sudden darkness and choked on his own spit. _“Danny?!”_

Danny was standing in the middle of the triangle, wearing pajama pants and no shirt, looking simultaneously terrified and extremely sheepish. He had toothpaste smudged on one cheek. Slowly, carefully, he placed a palm flat on the air between them. “Okay, I’m sorry for the whole ‘scared straight’ thing, I swear I can explain, could you just like...let me out? Please?”

Sam was shaking her head very rapidly. “No. No way, not until you tell us what the _hell_ you are.”

Despite his obvious discomfort, Danny had the nerve to smirk. In the dark, it was actually super disturbing. “Okay. The thing is–well, I _swing both ways,_ if you know what I mean.”

Sam stalled. “...What?”

“You know, like, I _bat for both teams.”_

Sam remained stalled. Tucker made a cracked sort of sound.

“Jesus, okay, tough crowd. Basically, I’m both very much alive and _maybe sort of a little bit..._ not alive.” He shifted uncomfortably to his other foot and leaned sideways against what to Tucker’s perception was thin air. “Vitally neutral. Schrödinger’s ghost, except not, because that would be the ghost of an old German guy. And then also sometimes I’m a portal. Is that good enough?”

Sam managed her second reboot of the night and choked out a laugh, taut and incredulous. “Uh, no?!”

Danny gazed off somewhere in the distance. “Well, it had better be, because Tucker’s mom just got home.” The next second, Tucker’s mom’s voice drifted up to them: “Tucker, honey? I’m home!”

“Are you really looking forward to explaining to her why you’ve got a major fire hazard going on her nice wood floor?” _Oh, yeah,_ Tucker noticed belatedly, _the candles are burning again._ They lit most of the room with a cheery warm light, but threw huge shadows on the ceiling. Danny’s kept moving in ways Danny himself didn’t. “Sorry, guys, I’m not helping you play this one off.” He let one accusing finger drag pointedly down the barrier.

Tucker’s mom yelled again, “Tucker? Are you up there? Sam?”

“Yeah, we’re here!” Tucker called back. He came to a snap decision. “How do we let you out?”

Sam spun on him. _“What?_ No, he could _eat us_ or something!”

Danny sighed. “For real, Sam? I’ve sat next to you in MUN for two full weeks, and now you think I eat people?”

“Sam, I am not telling my mom ghosts exist and my classmate from Chicago is actually dead.” (He ignored Danny’s sullen little interjection of “Only half….”) “We don’t have proof, and she already thinks I’m traumatized and fragile. I’ll end up in a psych ward.”

“That’s better than _eaten!_ He’s almost definitely, one hundred percent the serial killer, Tucker!”

“Woah, wait, hold on. You thought I was the _serial killer?”_ Danny raised an eyebrow. “Based on what? I’m from Chicago?”

“He’s not going to eat us, okay? And I saw the killer; it was a guy in a hoodie. If anything, this is proof that he’s not the killer, because why would someone with a horrifying ghostly alter-ego kill people as a human guy in a hoodie?”

“I don’t know why he would do anything, Tucker; he’s dead!”

(“Half….”)

Tucker sighed. “Okay, whatever you are, how do I release you?”

“Uhh….” Danny paused, thoughtful. “Widdershins is a classic. Counterclockwise, I mean. Just walk widdershins around the circle and say something about releasing me, maybe call upon a gatekeeper entity or two, and that should do it. Possibly I’ll just revert back to where I was when you started summoning, and you won’t have to call an Uber for me. Because I don’t have my phone, and I feel like that would be really awkward under the circumstances.”

Tucker didn’t even have the energy to laugh anymore; he had experienced too much supernaturally induced terror in the span of ten minutes. He felt like someone had injected anaesthesia directly into his brain. Slowly, he started walking counterclockwise around the edge of the circle. “Saint Peter, please release the spirit we have brought into this home. Hammer-Anubis, please release the spirit we have brought into this home. Uhh, leg guy–”

“Papa Legba,” Sam interrupted impatiently, though her voice was still trembling. “Ugh, fine, I’ll help you get us killed. Hermanubis, Saint Peter, Papa Legba, Keeper of the Gate, we thank you for opening it to us tonight. As I erase the lines that bind the gate, release the spirit bound within. As I snuff out the candles that light the way, may you guide it back from whence it came.” With one foot, she smeared away each of the runes as well as the Hebrew words and grid figure inside the circle, and then she pulled a pocketknife out of her pocket (and Tucker wasn’t even alarmed to see Sam with a knife; he was _truly_ spent) and quickly cut the lemon she was somehow _still holding_ in half. She walked around the circle extinguishing the candles with one half of the lemon, while keeping distrustful eyes on Danny whenever possible. When she got halfway around he started to look wispy around the edges, and when she snuffed out the final candle both she and Tucker looked away or blinked for a split second and then squinted back through the almost pitch blackness to find the triangle empty.

Tucker released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Is he gone?”

Sam grabbed his hand again in the darkness. He could feel her pulse jumping through her skin. “How should I know?!”

“Can we...turn on the lights? I mean, leave the circle….”

“Who knows if the circle even _does_ anything? I sure as hell don’t.” Sam sat abruptly on the ground, letting go of his hand again in the process. “Ghosts are real. The supernatural is actually real.”

Tucker gathered all of his courage, then leapt the two steps to the wall, slapped on the lights with extreme violence, and sprinted back into the circle. Under the harsh fluorescents, the room was suddenly a very different place. It was _his_ room, with his green bedspread and ceiling fan and cluttered dresser with one long sleeve hanging out of the top drawer. It was not a place that had been invaded by monsters, though it was a place they had been called to. Even ignoring the sprawling pentacle scarifying it, the floor looked weird bare of his round carpet. He stepped carefully out of the circle and went to get it from where they’d rolled it up against the wall. Nudging candles and Sam out of the way with his foot, he carefully unrolled it to cover the whole array; then he plopped down in the middle of it, relishing the way his fingers dug into the coarse knotted fibers. After a second, Sam joined him.

“Why the fuck did it work for you?” He could tell she tried to say it casually, jokingly, but there was a weird bitter undercurrent biting off her consonants, and he looked up, confused. She was still breathing hard and smirking to herself, a little wryly.

“What, summoning?”

“Yeah. I spent a whole year trying, and now….” She trailed off.

Tucker avoided her face; it was showing complicated things he knew she didn’t want him to see. “Maybe...now that Danny’s here?”

“Maybe.”

They sat in silence, leaning against each other for a minute, then two. Finally, Sam laughed once, a short, high sound, and pushed herself laboriously up, staggering a little when she made it to her feet. “Well, one thing’s for sure,” she commented. “Amity Park just got a helluva lot more interesting.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. I'm not saying anything about Danny's sexuality lol I just thought it was a really funny way to say you're half ghost. That said, read into it however you want; it's a romance-free story but a free country :)
> 
> 2\. Schrödinger was Austrian; Danny's just dumb.
> 
> 3\. Probably not going to update for a little while! I'm thinking I'll be back in like 2 months when my college apps are done. :/
> 
> 4\. Edit: I accidentally wrote circle instead of triangle a few times! just fixed it whoops


	8. Of Monumental Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Tucker take the first steps toward solving a mystery; it's not exciting. In other news, the Manson household is as chipper as ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's almost entirely dialogue. I had to dump some info. I'm so sorry.

Of Monumental Things

 _or alternatively:_ Our Heroes Do Some Research

Tucker woke up that morning and almost stepped on Sam, who resembled a black mop wrapped in a blanket on his floor.

Sitting up on the bed, he dangled one foot off and poked his toes into her head. When she didn’t respond, he planted his foot where her shoulder appeared to be and shook her back and forth.

“Mfff. Ughhhhhhhh.” Sam rolled over and gave him a dirty (if bleary) look. “You’re dead meat, Foley.”

“Good thing you’re vegan.”

“I don’t like the implications of that sentence.”

“Oh. Ohh. Nope, me neither.”

While Tucker retrieved his glasses from the bedside table, Sam wrestled one arm out of her blanket cocoon and threw it dramatically over her eyes. “What time is it?” she croaked.

Tucker checked his (silenced) alarm clock. “Uh...Nine-forty. Forty-three, actually.”

“Considering I summoned a demon yesterday, you could’ve at least let me sleep past ten.” Sam jolted a little, pulling her arm away from her face as the full import of her sentence hit her. “Wait, that actually happened, right? I wasn’t hallucinating?”

“I think so?”

“Then _Danny—_ oh my _god,_ Tucker, we’ve literally spent hours alone with him!!”

Cold mouse feet scurried up and down Tucker’s back. “That’s...terrifying.”

“And is he going to be at school tomorrow? How are we supposed to deal with that? He’s literally not human, what the _fuck_ even—” Sam sat up and pulled her blanket tighter around her shoulders.

Tucker took a deep breath and physically shook the idea off. He stood up and moved to the window, and the visible blue-white strip of light widened with a screeching sound as he raised the curtains, like their own personal bargain-bin sunrise. Outside, the telephone wires swayed lightly in the breeze, no crows adorning the wooden pole today. Without them, it stood out stark against the sky, a monument to some long-forgotten king.

“So that hunter guy,” Sam said from behind him, “he was one of the murder victims, right? Victor Sulker?”

Ugh. It had begun.

“Schulker, with a ‘kh’ noise. I think it’s German,” Tucker corrected warily. “Why?”

“So we’re investigating the case.”

He spun to face her. “No, _I’m_ investigating, extremely reluctantly, because I’m being haunted by the ghosts of the victims and it’s _very unpleasant._ I’m hoping one of them will just tell me something useful and I can tell the police and be done with it. You don’t have to do anything.”

Sam rolled her eyes. “Please, Tucker, of course I’m investigating. For one thing, I was already super interested in this case, and for another thing I got _really bored_ when you were all jumpy and absent.”

That was...exactly what he’d been hoping she’d say, if Tucker was honest with himself. Suddenly, this whole thing had gone from Extremely Ridiculously Horrifyingly Scary to just Extremely Ridiculously Very Scary, and though he felt a little guilt for involving her in his nightmare, it was very easily swamped, dragged under, and drowned mercilessly by his relief.

“Thank god. Uhh, so what do we do next?”

“No clue.” She paused. “We could, uh, try to summon—“

“We’re _not_ summoning that guy again.”

“Then we could...wait, how much do you actually know about this case?”

Tucker cringed. “I’ve actually kind of been deliberately avoiding it. So, almost nothing.”

Sam groaned and flopped backward onto his floor, pulling the blanket up over her face. A few seconds passed in silence.

“Alright,” she said, voice muffled. “I guess we’re doing some research.”

~(*0*)~

Sam leaned over Tucker’s shoulder, playing with his Rubix cube, as he tapped away at his laptop. He clicked the first result that contained the keywords “chicago amity murders unsolved news.” “Okay, so this article is from the Chicago Sun-Times. Uhh, talking to the families, something about mishandling evidence…” He flicked the touchpad to scroll down the page, then quickly stopped and backtracked. “Oh! Here’s a timeline. Okay, first victim was Frankie Young, a—shit. Eleven-year-old from the Chicago suburbs.” They paused for a second. “That’s horrible,” said Tucker.

“Yep.”

“...Anyway, he was found on March 15th. The next one was John “Johnny” Mallory–oh, apparently a famous stunt motorcyclist? Found April 30th. And they immediately started investigating the connection because of a pattern...of…” —he scrolled down to see the rest of the text box— “...burns, that the bodies had in common. And it wasn’t a detail they’d released to the public.”

Sam suddenly slammed the Rubix cube down on the desk, missing his hand by an inch. “Wait, John Mallory was a famous motorcyclist? Is he J13? My friend Geoff–the guy with the weird tan, remember–was super into that guy, and I think his real name is John, or James something?”

“I’ll look it up.” He opened a new tab and searched “john mallory motorcycle.” The top results were all obituary or tribute pages. “Woah. Yeah, it was him. J13, pretty big name. He was a stuntman in _Fast and Furious 8_ , made it to the X Games for motocross at one point. Not huge yet, but people came to his shows with a couple other stunters.”

“Yeah, Geoff said he’s not a super consistent rider, but he’s done some _crazy_ stuff. Some of his videos—like, _dude.”_ She leaned down and stole his trackpad, clicking on a video. In it, a motorcyclist in a black helmet with “13” painted on the front zoomed down an almost vertical ramp only slightly wider than his wheels shaped like a ski jump, hit the curve upward at the end, did a few flips and contortions in the air, and after a full loop landed facing backwards on the same tiny ramp.

“Woah.” Tucker wasn’t a huge sports guy, but _damn._ “How did this guy not die until now?”

Sam snorted out one of those “I shouldn’t be laughing at this” laughs. “I mean, you’re not wrong.”

The chair squeaked quietly as Tucker closed out the tab and switched back to the previous article. “Okay, the next person discovered was—oh. Kwan’s mom.” The cheer evaporated from the room, leaving behind a residue of uncomfortable gloom. “June 21st.”

Sam stared at the desk, tracing a knot in the wood with a finger, while Tucker closed some other old tabs he had open. “Did you know her?” she asked suddenly.

Tucker looked up at her in surprise. That was a weird tone from Sam. “Uh, not really,” he offered. “You?”

“No. I mean, my parents once asked her to take me home after school in, like, elementary school? She made really good popcorn. Although now that I think about it, it probably just came from a bag....” She trailed off.

Outside, a crow screamed. Someone shouted something and slammed their door.

Tucker cleared his throat. “Anyway, after her is where it apparently gets weird.” He leaned in to read the small print. “The next victim was Nikolai Technus, this software developer, also from Amity. He was found on...July 4th. Oh, the Fourth of July. And he had a similar burn pattern to the others, but a completely different cause of death. All the others—oh, that’s not given, I wonder why this is—but anyway he was blunt force trauma-d. To the head, and also a lot of bruising and internal bleeding. Yowch.” Tucker cringed in sympathy.

“The whole burn thing: Does it say what’s up with that? Like, pre- or postmortem?” Sam was now rapping the Rubix cube impatiently on the desk, and Tucker was tempted to snatch it, but he wasn’t quite willing to risk life and limb. Sam fought dirty.

He skimmed the article above the timeline. “Uhh...yeah, they do say. Postmortem.”

“Huh.”

Tucker returned to the timeline. “So there’s two more victims to date: Amber McClain and Victor Schulker.”

“No note on your cousin?” Sam ventured after a brief hesitation.

He skimmed again. “Apparently not. So if the police think it’s connected, I guess they’re not telling the media.”

“Huh. I guess that’s good,” Sam allowed. “The local media’s not handling this great. They’ve done everything but give this guy a cutesy name.”

“There’s no name yet?”

“Yeah. Naming them is usually a bad idea. Inspires copycats, for one. Just like releasing modus operandi information, like the stuff about the burns. I actually did read somewhere what the pattern was: small first-degree burns on the sides of the wrists and ankles.”

 _Gross._ Also, why would she know that? “Do you just research this stuff for _fun?”_ Tucker asked, a little weirded out.

Sam sniffed. “Not _fun,_ per se _._ Mainly because when someone inevitably makes a true-crime podcast about this case and starts interviewing locals, I’m gonna be ready.”

“Okay, that’s _slightly_ less scary.” He flicked the trackpad to let the whole article zoom past, then stopped it and half-turned to face her. “What bothers me about this whole thing is don’t serial killers usually target a specific _type_ of person? Like a profile? These people have absolutely zilch in common.”

Sam frowned and set the Rubix cube with an air of finality on the desk. She backtracked to his bed and dropped heavily onto the foot of it, narrowly avoiding hitting her head on the wall as she bounced. “Yeah, you’re right. Completely different ages, men _and_ women, different ethnicities, I think different religions.” She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. “I read that Technus had a rap sheet, and I think Schulker was under investigation for something at some point, but Mrs. Ainara certainly didn’t have a record.”

“They’re not even all American—Schulker was from Canada,” Tucker noted. Then he paused, considering that more. “Mrs. Ainara came from Japan in her teens, right? And Schulker was a Canadian citizen traveling in the U.S.?

“I think the news said he came from Germany as a kid, too.” Sam propped herself up a little higher. “Look up the others!”

It only took about thirty seconds to kill that train of thought. “Nope. Technus was Polish but born in the U.S., and Mallory was a white-as-bread all-American several-generations citizen. And my cousin’s whole family has been here, obviously; I keep forgetting him.”

Sam frowned. “So they have absolutely nothing in common.”

“Yyyyep.”

There was silence in the room for a minute. Sam flopped backward onto the bed and stared at the ceiling, kicking her legs morosely. Tucker peeled himself out of the swivel chair and padded over to turn on the fan, mainly just for something to do. Outside, ragged strips of cloud drifted overhead, their shadows skating over the treetops and the paneled roofs of the one-story houses that surrounded the apartment. Tucker had always liked being able to look out his bedroom window and see people’s roofs. It was almost afternoon, and though there was probably a September chill outside, it looked from here like a hot, sunny day.

“The burns thing is weird,” Sam piped up after a minute, still staring at the ceiling. He plopped back into his computer chair and spun around to face her. “It’s very ritual-y.”

“I mean...yeah, but isn’t that sort of a serial killer _thing?_ Weird rituals that they do when they kill?”

“Sort of. Not all of them, but a lot, I guess. But that’s not what I mean, I mean _occult-_ y. I’m trying to imagine how you would get those kinds of small burns, and I’m thinking candles.”

“Well, a serial killer who’s into the occult wouldn’t _surprise_ me.”

“Me neither.” She hooked her legs against the side of the bed and used her abs to slowly swing herself up to sitting. “Wait, what was the date when they found Mrs. Ainara’s...you know...body again?”

Tucker huffed a nervous laugh at the awkward horribleness of that. It felt…weird to be talking like this about someone they both knew, if only in passing—the mother of one of their classmates. They weren’t exactly friends with Kwan, but they’d seen the effect it had had on him. It was disturbing, in a subtle, twist-in-your-gut kind of way, to think that there were probably thousands of people reading about the ending of her life to whom she was just a name, just like the other people on this list were to them. Those people were capable of discussing her casually, clinically, making jokes, using the word “yowch.”

It drove home the scope of this thing. Six people was really a small number—but it wasn’t really a number.

“Uh. They found her on June 21st.”

“...That’s the summer solstice.”

They looked at each other, wide-eyed. Sam bounced to her feet and quickly crossed the room, grabbing the back of his swivel chair with both hands and leaning forward onto it, so he had to push backward against the floor with his feet to avoid being rolled forward. “Gimme the other dates.”

Obligingly, he pulled up the timeline again.

“Don’t know about the first one, but April 30th I’m almost _positive_ is a thing. Then there’s the summer solstice, which has huge significance to a lot of traditions...dunno about the Fourth of July...August 1st is _definitely_ a holiday, it’s one of the Irish ones! I remember because the name was, like, ‘nose’ something. It involved noses.”

Tucker typed it in another tab. “Lughnasadh?”

“Yeah!”

“What does that have to do with noses?”

“It’s the ‘-nasadh,’ I guess. Like ‘nasal.’”

With mounting urgency, Tucker searched the other dates. Some took more keyword-fishing than others. “Okay, we’ve got the Ides of March, Walpurgisnacht which is also Beltane Eve, the summer solstice which is Litha and a bunch of other things, July 4th which is still kind of a mystery but this sketchy website says is 13 days after Litha and therefore some sort of Satanist half-birthday kind of thing?—And then Lughnasadh and one more that doesn’t seem to have any significance,” Tucker recapped.

“Which one is it again?”

“Schulker, September 13.”

Sam squinted threateningly over his shoulder at the computer for a minute, while he, too, wracked his brains for any possible way it fit into the pattern.

Suddenly, he straightened so fast he felt something _pop_ in his lower spine. “Friday. September 13 was a Friday.”

“Holy—” Sam let go of his chair and stepped back so fast that he didn’t have time to stop pushing against her weight with his feet and went rolling backward, almost tipping over when the wheels hit the edge of the carpet. He quickly got out of the seat after that. “Holy shit, Tuck, they all fit,” Sam said. “Do the police know about this?!”

“I don’t know, maybe? I don’t think they’ve mentioned it.” He paced around the room, suddenly filled with nervous energy. When that wasn’t enough, he climbed up and started jumping on the bed, running his fingers through his hair, accidentally tugging on his dreads and knocking his glasses down over his nose. “Holy crap, this is actually really big!”

“What do we even do with this?!”

“Should we tell the police, like, just to make sure? Or I guess I could tell my Pseudo-Uncle Brock?” “Uncle” Brock, Maurice Foley’s cop cousin, had left as quietly as he’d come. That was pretty quietly, given that his time staying in the Foley house had been characterized by his going out early in the morning to the gym and coming back late at night after long shifts, when the rest of the house had already gone to sleep. Brock was also a pretty quiet, unobtrusive guy; if not for the occasional manly nod on the way out the door, the size 14 loafers in the hall, and the way cereal boxes lasted around half as long as they used to, Tucker would have barely noticed his presence or lack thereof.

“What if they don’t believe we just figured it out and it’s suspicious? My parents would _freak out_ if I got police attention again.” Sam paused, then slowly grinned. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea.”

Tucker let himself drop into sitting position on the bed. “Wait, I’d really rather not be investigated either. Especially because I was the only other witness when Tristan got attacked, and his friends would probably say I was acting weird before.” He worried at one fingernail with the other hand. “Crap.”

“We could call in an anonymous tip?”

“Can they track those?”

They both considered. Sam stole Tucker’s computer chair and started spinning. “Uhh, maybe? Probably.”

Something tickled the edge of Tucker’s memory. “Doesn’t the local news have a hotline for this case?”

“Do they?” Sam woke up his laptop (again, _how_ did she know his password?) and looked it up. “You’re right, they’ve got one.”

“But what if the police know about the whole date thing, and they’re trying to keep it quiet?”

“It seems really unlikely that they would release the thing about the burns but keep this quiet.”

“That’s true….”

They paused for a second, mulling it over. It was getting a little chilly, so Tucker got up and killed the fan. As he walked back over to his desk, he stood on tiptoes and interrupted its slowing spin with his fingertips, dragging them over a few blades and then stretching up a bit more to just block a blade entirely. The fan bounced twice before it finally made a worrying grinding sound and stilled.

Sam stood. “Let’s do it.”

“Right now?!”

“Yep.” Sam pulled out her cellphone and hit *67 to hide her caller ID, then started dialing the number on the laptop screen. “You want me to do it?”

“...Sure, I guess.”

The phone rang a few times before someone on the other end picked it up. “This is the Amity Local News, bringing you the truth and nothing but the truth, plus some occasional paid promotions by local businesses, since 1995! How can we help you?”

Sam cleared her throat and lowered her voice a few tones. “I’d like to report a tip? On the serial killer case.”

“Oh! Oh my god, really?” The voice on the other end positively quivered. “Thank you so much! What’s the tip?”

~(*0*)~

About forty minutes after the overly perky and breathless-in-a-way-that-kinda-weirded-Sam-out tip line monitor hung up, a realization twisted Tucker’s intestines into double knots. “Wait—what about Tristan?”

Sam turned to him, wide-eyed. “Oh—you’re right! What was the date?”

“Uhh, September 8th?” He clicked a few times. Then clicked some more. Then some more.

Five minutes later, he quietly closed his laptop. “Nothing.”

Sam leaned sideways against the wall next to him. She didn’t respond for a second, then admitted, “Also, I just remembered something. Friday the 13th is more of a modern thing, so using it as a day of occult significance for a murder seems almost . . . tongue-in-cheek.” She made a _blech_ face and swiped the laptop. “Yeah, see, Wikipedia says it didn’t become a thing until the 19th century, also it’s Tuesday the 13th in Hispanic and Greek cultures and Friday the 17th in Italy. It’s not ancient or religious like the other dates.”

“Was that all a coincidence? Did we just give them a bad tip?”

Sam shrugged. “I mean, all we did was figure out a thing that might be true. They’ll do their own research, not just take whatever we said at face value.”

It was noon, and he and Sam were still hanging around his room. With the summoning circle covered up by the rug and all the candles cleaned up the night before so Sam could sleep there, the only reminder of the night before was a permeating and, Tucker feared, permanent _eau de sandalwood._

“Sooo…,” Sam drawled, sitting up against his dresser on the floor, “what’s next?”

“I mean, that was kind of a lot.”

“That took like an hour tops, if you ignore the time we spent messing around and showing each other memes.”

(The author chose to ignore the time they spent messing around and showing each other memes.)

“It was a big thing! I’m sure the universe will be cool with it for a little while.”

“You really think so?” Sam gave him the same look she always gave when he skipped his homework, even though she usually half-assed the same homework. Her GPA was only like a half-point above his. “We could….” She’d started putting her messy hair up in a ponytail and wasn’t looking him in the eyes. “I heard they took down the police tape at the library. We could go check out the bathroom, see if you get any” —she wiggled her fingers— “vibes.”

Tucker sputtered. “Seriously? No way!”

“Come on! With my occult know-how and your psychic-ness we stand an actual chance of saving lives here!”

Tucker started emphatically pulling off the socks he’d slept in. “You–Do I have to repeat my speech about my utter lack of badassery? ‘Cause that was damaging enough to my ego the first time.”

“Ugh, fine.” Sam rolled her eyes at him in a way that made it very clear she did not see how stressed the idea made him and was in no way showing mercy, or demonstrating empathy. “Then you owe me lunch, at least.”

“That, I can do.”

And thus, the afternoon passed in a haze of reluctantly vegetarian paninis, planning their first electropunk single once they realized what a great band name “Reluctantly Vegetarian Paninis” would be, and strategizing on what to do about Danny now that they knew that he was, y’know, whatever he was. They eventually decided on confronting him about it in a very public place with a lot of witnesses. It would have to happen eventually, so they might as well choose the playing field.

At around 6:02 Sam looked at the clock and suddenly stood, abandoning her Mario Kart (Princess Peach; she claimed it was ironic) to careen over the edge of the road. “Crap. I’m supposed to go ice skating with my dad at 7.”

Tucker almost crashed himself in his surprise. “Your dad? Really?”

“Yeah, it’s going to be so awkward.” She dropped again onto the couch and let her head loll back onto the cushions. The living room window shades had all been pulled back to let in the maximum amount of light, even if the glare off the TV had been throwing Tucker off his game. The glare was dying down now anyway, what with the lengthening autumn nights; sunset was at 5 p.m., so by now the sky had that internal blue glow that made it look convex rather than concave, or like the deep ocean illuminated from within by submarine lights and angler fish. Houses became silhouettes, and telephone lines were indistinct except where they crisscrossed the last sunlight leaching up just above the horizon.

“You want me to come?” Tucker offered.

“Nah, he wanted it to just be the two of us….”

“So when are you gonna leave?”

“Uh, I should go at like 6:15.”

“Sweet.” Tucker grinned pointily. “I’m turning on _Teen Wolf.”_

“What did I ever do to you?”

~(*0*)~

At 6:15 Tucker paused the show mid slo-mo sequence. “Don’t you have to get going?”

Sam stole another of the faded pink-embroidered pillows from Tucker’s couch. She now had four on the left side, while he was down to one. “Finish the episode, I’ll go at 6:30.”

At 6:32, Tucker said, “Sam, it’s 6:32….”

“Okay, but _why_ do the suicides keep happening at that hotel? Like, is the curse of the hotel that they all arrive at the hotel in the midst of unrelated circumstances that cause there to be wolfsbane around or a bite or something that would kill them anyway? That’s, like, exceedingly specific.”

“It’s for the vibe, you aren’t supposed to ask these questions.”

“Yeah, I guess I appreciate the vibe.”

“But, uh, are you gonna go meet your dad?”

Sam chewed on one purple nail. “Ugh, I mean, my stuff is all over your house so at this point I’ll be late anyway.”

“So…what time are you going, then?

_Tick, tick._

Sam inspected her nail for a second, frowning at the cracks in the matte. “You know what, screw it. This is more important, we’re embroiled in a murder investigation! Like, that’s crazy! And magic is _real._ I think I need a little more time to process that.”

Tucker shrugged. “Alright, if you want to hang around here more that’s fine by me.” He paused. “You gonna…text him?”

Sam visibly waffled. “Ugh, then he’ll call and be all pissy and want to know why. If I don’t text, I can just say I forgot!”

“Okay, as long as you’re ready to lose at Mario Kart again.”

Sam scowled. “I wanna go back to Wii fencing.”

“Sam, I thought we’d established I have self preservation instincts!”

Sam flicked the button to silence her cell phone with that same cracked purple fingernail. “I’ll steal your cereal.”

“Hey!!”

~(*0*)~

The Manson mansion _(for real,_ Sam thought, _our last name is Manson, couldn’t we have gotten, like, a bungalow?)_ was dark when Sam pulled up in front and fished her keys out of the cupholders in her car. It took a little scrabbling around among old gum wrappers and spare change before she could get them, and as she pulled them out one wrapper was dragged over the edge and drifted to the floor. She hit the lock button reluctantly, mostly killing the car’s headlights, as she picked her way up the small semicircle of brick steps leading to the front door. Phone flashlights were for cowards.

The fumbling of the key in the lock sounded too loud for the silent cul-de-sac. Even the couple who always threw those loud parties her parents enjoyed complaining about so much seemed to have turned in early. Oh, wait, it was almost 11. Sam fumbled faster.

Only to have the door opened—scaring the bejeezus out of her in the process—by her father. He stared her down for a moment, wearing a hint of stubble and a monogrammed bathrobe with the same dearth of panache. “Samantha. Why didn’t you come to the ice rink? I cleared my schedule for you. I was waiting for forty minutes.”

Sam mentally prepared herself for some of the greatest acting of her life. “That was today?! Crap, I’m so sorry, Dad, I totally forgot!”

Jeremy Manson glowered. “That was very irresponsible of you, Sam. And why didn’t you answer any of my calls?”

“I have to put my phone on silent for school, and I guess I just forgot to take it off. I’m _so_ sorry, Dad, can we do it another time?”

He _hmph-_ ed and stepped aside to let her in the door. It was strange to hear him padding down the dark hallway in bare feet while she clomped along in the combat boots she was regretting a little right now. Her mom always complained that they scratched off the finish on the hardwood. “I’ll try to find another time, but I’m facing some issues at work that might not blow over soon. I’ll let you know after I look at my schedule. But Sam, this kind of behavior is unacceptable. I expect you to keep your ringer on in the future, and if your teachers complain tell them they can speak to me. And you really should start keeping a calendar.”

Sam held the relief down in her throat, out of her face. She probably wasn’t going to do either of those things (Jeremy Manson wasn’t the type to cold-call her at school to make sure her ringer wasn’t silenced), and it looked like there wouldn’t be any consequences beyond that.

They turned left out of the narrow hallway, and the light changed from moonlight blue to orange. Two lamps were on in the living room. And sitting between them on the mauve flowery couch, brooding like a supervillain with perfect posture, was Pamela Manson. Sam startled and banged her hip into the sharp side of the doorway.

“Where have you been, Samantha?” In sharp contrast to her father’s rumpled exhaustion, her mother seemed wide awake, sitting at jagged angles in a pristine blue silk pajama set.

Sam reluctantly walked further in, cringing in anticipation. “Tucker’s, why?”

“You were extremely rude to your father today. Maybe you should be spending less time with Tucker; he’s apparently a bad influence.”

 _Crap, crap crap crap! No way._ “Mom, you know Tucker!” Sam squawked before tempering her tone a bit. “You like his parents! And anyway, you can’t tell me who I can associate with anymore, I’m sixteen!”

“A sixteen-year-old who only has a car because we let her.”

Sam’s father shifted where he stood slightly behind her and to the right, covering up a yawn. “Pamela, I was annoyed earlier, but I would have been home early anyway. We can leave this discussion for the morning.”

“Jeremy, we can’t just let her act like this, it’s disrespectful!” Pamela broke her perfect-posture supervillain pose to lean forward a bit, gesticulating wildly. Her eyes were slightly red, and without makeup she looked just a bit crumpled around the edges, like cheap polyester.

“I already spoke to her when she came in, and she understands that she needs to avoid this sort of behavior in the future. And we could give her some chores or take the car, but can we please talk about it in the morning?” Jeremy apparently realized then that nothing was likely to happen if he just stood there continuing the conversation, so he started walking slowly away with an air of _“I know you probably won’t, but I’m still hoping against hope that you’ll follow my example.”_

And then her mom was muttering something under her breath, and something creaked in the attic, and the tip of Sam’s tongue hurt from not railing against injustice and also biting it earlier. So she decided to make it worse.

“It’s kind of hilarious, though, you getting mad at me for not showing up.”

Her mother’s green eyes snapped up. The lamplight sparked and scattered off stray red hairs. “Oh for god’s sake, not this again.”

Jeremy gave up on escaping and stopped, leaning one hip against the wall next to the entrance to the hallway. “Sam, you know we _do_ try to make it to your events. I came to your last debate, and I wanted to come to the Audubon thing but things come up and you have to understand it puts us in a difficult–”

“No.” Pamela whipped around, shaking her head and sending more orange hairs escaping from her loose updo. “No, you don’t need to make excuses, Jeremy.”

“I’m just saying–”

Sam found herself spreading out her stance, readying for battle even as a part of her wondered why she was even doing this, the part that just wanted to go to sleep and was so _done_ . But the rest of her was filling up with superheated air from her lungs, nitrogen bubbles escaping her tissue and gushing into her blood. “At least Dad has an excuse! He works! What do you even _do_ all day, Mom?!”

At that, Pamela stood, with far less than her usual grace. One finger shook in the air by her head. _“How dare you.”_

“I don’t even see you anymore! What do you _do,_ besides sit in your room brainstorming new ways to ruin my life?!”

Sam’s dad pushed off the wall at that, cheeks flushing. “Sam, apologize to your mother!” he boomed, but both ignored him.

“Other people are allowed to have problems, Samantha! The universe doesn’t revolve around you!”

“Pamela, that is our daughter! That is out of line—”

“Don’t call me fucking Samantha!”

“It’s your fucking name, it’s what I named you!”

“Sammy, we care about you so much, it’s just hard sometimes but we’re trying—Pamela—”

“I am a goddamn fantastic mother, and I also have my own fucking life—”

_“Pamela, shut up!!”_

_“Don’t you dare fucking start on me, Jeremy!”_ It was almost screamed.

The room went silent.

For a moment all three stood there looking at each other, shell-shocked. The lamps flickered.

Jeremy was the first to back up.

“I think you need to go clear your head.” He started walking quickly toward the hallway.

Sam was left feeling not unlike she’d just witnessed an Olympic ping pong tournament. Wasn’t that a thing during the Cold War? Ping pong diplomacy?

Pamela deflated, suddenly and without warning, back into a sitting position on the edge of the couch. “Sam, go to bed,” she rasped quietly, not looking her in the eye.

Sam hovered on the edge of the living room’s pool of light. The upholstery flowers curled around each other ever so slightly, wriggling like worms. The lamps flickered again. Pamela reached up with one hand and turned one off with a loud _click._ The nitrogen bubbles had made it up Sam’s spinal column to the brainstem, and for a moment she stood paralyzed, weightless, detached.

Slowly, Sam walked to her bathroom. The light was too bright. She took her toothbrush out of the drawer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> College apps took a whiiiile but we are resuming! And the next chapter shouldn't take as long to write since Danny's gonna be back, and I'm excited.


	9. Of Bananas, Lemons, and the Living Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tucker and Sam get a few things explained. Sometimes good detective work is just asking politely.

Of Bananas, Lemons, and the Living Dead

 _or alternatively:_ Some Answers, Finally

When they met up on the steps of Casper High the next morning (Sam didn’t have the car on Mondays), Sam was practically bouncing in her black Vans. “So I have a theory,” she announced breathlessly.

“Jeez, how late were you up?” Tucker cringed just to look at her under-eye bags. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and even her skin looked tired.

“Not _that_ late. I was excited, nothing this exciting has ever happened to me! Now do you want to hear my theory or not?”

Tucker raised an eyebrow and readjusted his beret. “Okay?”

She crested the last step and stopped next to him, readjusting her backpack straps. They were obstructing foot traffic, but Sam didn’t generally care about that sort of thing. Students streamed around them, their body language and complai– _conversations_ expressing various flavors of exhaustion. “I did some more research,” Sam explained. “Into the victims themselves, not the actual case. Apparently, Nikolai Technus was an infamous black hat hacker. Stole millions, wiped out some people’s entire savings to pay for his sister’s hospital bills, but they could only make a few charges stick, so he did, like, five years. And _Schulker_ went to trial but was acquitted for the murder and cannibalization of two hikers in the Canadian Rockies.”

“You think the murders are some sort of vigilante thing?” Tucker frowned. “But that doesn’t make sense; Mrs. Ainara and my cousin were targeted. And one of them was a little kid!”

Sam looked suddenly uncomfortable, seemingly noticing for the first time the high schoolers shuffling past them. She grabbed his arm and started steering him through the doors, into the hallway. “But Tucker…I hate to bring it up, but didn’t your cousin have that thing? With the girl at the party…”

Tucker halted in front of Lancer’s door, dragging her to a stop by virtue of her grip on his arm. “That was _not true,”_ he whispered fiercely. “She _said_ he was the wrong guy, and she confirmed it when they arrested the right person! Tristan would _not_ do anything like that.”

“I know, I know!” Sam quickly assured him, looking a little surprised. “I’m saying, though, the killer might not, or might be operating on some crazy, distorted idea of justice. You have to admit, it’s weird that three out of the seven of them were suspects in criminal investigations. And I feel like Ember was a little sketchy, right?”

Tucker shook off her arm and walked through the door a little abruptly, but he was mollified. “I don’t know, I don’t think I ever met her.”

Sam took a seat at a desk near the back, Tucker settling in the one to her left, next to the window. She leaned over to talk to him in a lowered voice as he opened his backpack. “My parents made some comments when the school sent out the newsletter about what happened to her. Apparently she had a reputation. Not sure what, though.”

“Huh.” Tucker leaned back in his seat, twiddling with the mechanical pencil he’d dug out of his pencil case. “I mean, I guess it’s a decent theory, but—”

He cut off abruptly, staring at the front of the room. Sam followed his gaze. Danny had just walked in.

He noticed them immediately too, making quick, accidental eye contact over the heads of the Kids With Weird Allergies Coalition (they’d really bonded over that microwave campaign) and then hurrying to sit at one of the open desks on the far side of the room. Tucker’s mouth felt dry and his heartbeat jumped, but his Nightmare Sense remained disturbingly silent.

Sam tried to say something else to Tucker, but she was cut off by the bell ringing (they both jumped) and then Lancer striding out of his office and into the main classroom.

“Good morning, students!” he enthused, setting down his coffee to stand jauntily at attention behind his desk. “And happy Monday!” The only answer was a Greek chorus of groans, the usual accompaniment to Lancer’s announcements. Lancer was literally the only person in the room happy that it was Monday.

 _“Jane Eyre,_ people, it’s not that bad. You didn’t even have homework due today. That’s not something you’ll experience often in this class.”

While Lancer pulled up his hideously designed but informative Google Slides about “The Most Dangerous Game,” Sam leaned over and intoned to Tucker, “Do we try to catch him in the hallway after class? Or lunch?”

Tucker considered. “Are we gonna be able to find him at lunch?”

“I don’t know, probably?”

 _“Miss Manson!”_ Sam jerked in her seat, looking up at their slightly red-flushed teacher. “Please pay more attention, this will be important,” Lancer sighed in his nasally voice.

“Sorry, Mr. Lancer.” Sam exchanged one more loaded glance with Tucker and then focused her attention on the board. Tucker’s eyes slid over to the other side of the room. Danny was staring at them again, but he swiftly looked away when Tucker caught him.

~(*0*)~

They were, in fact, able to find Danny at lunch—he was standing outside Tucker’s Physics classroom, trying and failing to look like he wasn’t waiting for him. Which meant Danny had almost definitely heard their whispered conversation from across the classroom. Which was really, really scary.

“Hey, Tucker,” he said, trying to grin easily and instead resembling a nervous hyena. “Is Sam around? I think we have some things to clear up.”

Tucker eyed those teeth, backing away a foot or two. “Uh, yes. Definitely,” he responded, projecting confidence about as well as Danny was projecting nonchalance.

“But not here,” Danny added, glancing around. A passing pedestrian jostled Tucker toward him, and Tucker hurriedly pushed back before they could touch. Danny didn’t seem to notice, pointing down the hall. “There’s this maintenance closet outside our French classroom. Text Sam to meet us there?”

“Hold up.” Tucker fought his way into a less busy side hallway and turned to fully face Danny, both of them standing against the wall. “We are not going anywhere alone with you, dude. We are staying where there are _witnesses.”_

“For real?!” Danny whispered back. “Do you really think I’m going to murder you in a closet with security cameras outside, in the middle of the school day?”

“I don’t know, man, this is all kind of new territory for me!”

Danny ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “Look, I can’t talk about this around people, okay? The government’s been trying to dissect me for like a year now!”

Tucker…supposed that was reasonable. In some senses of the word. In this weird new world they’d only just discovered they’d been living in all along. He sighed. “Okay, fine. We’ll go to the closet.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and quickly texted Sam about the change in plans. “People are definitely going to think we’re making out,” he added under his breath.

Danny laughed nervously. “As long as they still think I’m _alive,_ I’ve learned not to care.”

They made it to the closet and waited until Sam had gotten there, voiced her own objections, and heard Danny’s understandable reasons for wanting secrecy. She still made sure multiple people passed by and saw them before they turned to the closet door, Sam and Danny hovering uncertainly in front of it and Tucker leaning with forced nonchalance against the glass fire extinguisher case a few feet down the hall. “I don’t have a bobby pin on me today, so how are we getting in?” she griped, more as a final reason not to go in the closet than as acknowledgement of an actual obstacle.

Danny looked around. “Uh, cover me.”

Sam looked at Tucker, who shrugged, and then they stepped in close on either side of Danny to hide whatever he was about to do from prying eyes. And then Tucker did a double take as Danny’s hand met wood and then just kept going _through_ the door. His stomach flip-flopped, and he tasted iron and ozone way back in his molars. Sam just kept staring, openmouthed, as the doorknob _turned_ on its own, or more accurately was turned from the other side, and then Danny pulled it open with his other hand and removed the one previously _in_ the door. “Voila.” He stepped aside with a slight bow to let them in.

“What the hell did I just watch.” Sam looked a little traumatized and made no move to enter.

Danny huffed in exasperation. “Seriously, that was _so_ basic, now could you _please_ get in the closet before people see? Please?”

Tucker blinked once and then decided to just accept it. He really had seen way weirder. He went into the closet, fumbling for the light more urgently than he might have a week ago. After a moment, Sam followed.

With Danny inside and the door closed, they all began to realize that it really was a tiny closet. The small light in the ceiling was one of those old-school plastic-covered ones, and the cover was filled with the silhouettes of dead flies, which cast faint orangey shadows over their heads. Tucker examined the cracking green walls for any livelier bugs as Danny cracked his knuckles (not the best nervous habit when you were trying to appear nonthreatening) and exhaled. “Uh, so I’m going to start by apologizing, again, for scaring you guys the other night. I’m told my ghost form is a little…much, if you’re not used to it. I was just trying to get you to not mess with the supernatural again, because it’s _really dangerous,_ but I guess I maybe could have handled it better? Anyway, if you would not turn me in to the government to get, like, tortured and stuff, I would really appreciate that.”

Tucker and Sam stared at him blankly. Finally, Tucker processed all the information revealed in that spiel. “Uh. Sure. That seems fair.”

“Yeah,” Sam said slowly, after a second. “We can do that. You don’t try to eat us, and we won’t turn you in. Sounds like a plan. But we have some questions.”

Danny started to rub the back of his neck with one hand, banged his elbow on the shelf, jumped, and brought it back down quickly. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, uh…what do you want to know?”

Tucker was trying to think of a polite way to phrase the question on his mind when Sam, ever the more straightforward of the two, just went for it. “What _are_ you?”

Danny shifted, moving back into the corner between the wall and the shelf of cleaning supplies to make a little more space, as he took a deep breath and began. “So. I have some abilities that one might describe as ghostly, and I’m affected by a lot of the same things fully dead people are. But I can switch back and I’m obviously still alive, too. Based on what I’ve gathered from, ah, some of the more…traditionally deceased, I’m simultaneously alive and my own ghost, like a sort of halfway point. And then another side effect is that as far as we understand, I’m a portal.”

Sam frowned. “A portal between what and what, exactly?”

“Between the dimension or realm or whatever of the restless dead, and this one.”

In the ensuing silence, a thought occurred to Tucker. He wasn’t gonna say it. He wasn’t gonna say it…He had to say it. “Bro…you’re like Raven from _Teen Titans.”_

Danny choked on a burst of incredulous laughter. “Wow. Actually, yeah. But instead of cool magic tattoos I get random bouts of intense nausea.”

“So when you would skip out of classes and stuff, or disappear during lunch, you were in here…throwing up ghosts,” Sam stated flatly.

Danny cringed. “Or hunting things that were already here, or hunting down the ones that get away. But yeah, pretty much. It’s really gross.” He sounded personally offended by these circumstances.

“And no one else at school knows?” Tucker asked.

“Nope. It’s really a miracle I’ve hidden it this long; I’ve been almost caught like eight times since I got here.” He started counting on his fingers, looking up at the treacherous lightbulb and its victims. “There was Mikey, there was that blonde girl and the Asian guy from my Chem class, there was the _actual janitor…_ it’s just a mess, let’s be honest.”

It took a while for them to get out of the closet. At some point they all got tired of standing, and then Tucker knocked an empty and very _loud_ container of bleach off the shelf and almost got them caught by a teacher, so they ended up sitting on the floor, Sam’s knees bumping up against Danny’s as she leaned back onto Tucker’s side and he braced his feet against the door. And Danny told the story of how he’d died.

His parents were parabiologists (or, as they preferred, _ectologists)_ as a very time-consuming hobby, although they paid the bills as a chemical engineer and a regular engineer. And at their last house in Chicago, not long before the start of Danny’s sophomore year, they scavenged parts on moonlit nights and built _something_ in the basement. It was a shadowy hunk of machinery as tall as cathedral doors, with twinkling lights that disappeared when you looked at them straight on and strange reflections that twisted of their own accord across impossible planes. It made strange humming sounds late at night, at a frequency so low that the whole house quivered in its foundation. But for all its ominous vibes, it didn’t actually _do_ anything, no matter what the Fentons poked or prodded.

That is, until Danny was cleaning the basement lab and happened to trip on an exposed wire (a wire he couldn’t find later, no matter how hard he searched) and fall into the machine in the basement. He remembered the smell of burning hair and bright green light, and the feeling of his esophagus crawling into his stomach, and then he remembered waking up on the floor of the lab at three in the morning and stumbling upstairs to his room, mind foggy and muscles still seizing, to pass out again in bed.

It was the next day, when he woke up with a floating-y feeling and scared himself to death (heh) looking in the mirror, that things started to get really weird. And it only escalated from there.

Ghosts began finding him, even those who already resided in the land of the living or had entered the dimension through other, less testy portals. Some were friendly, just looking for a door to the other side as the logical next step toward whatever, if anything, lay beyond. Most were decidedly _not_ friendly; a lot weren’t even coherent. These, he could forcibly send back. (And no, he hastily clarified as he saw Tucker’s wide eyes and correctly read the question on the tip of his tongue, he did _not_ have to eat the ghosts to do that; how many times did he need to reassure them that he _did not eat people?!_ Tucker thought again of the ghost in the triangle’s big, wide mouth and said nothing.) At first, his parents were ecstatic about their neighborhood’s sudden, inexplicable uptick in paranormal activity. Then the house began accruing damage, and no one could tell where it was coming from. Including their insurance company. Creeping _things_ started coming to Danny’s school, and back then he wasn’t nearly as experienced at fighting them off. They sent kids of all ages and their teachers flooding into the hallways, chased by nothing but a nameless reflexive panic, an involuntary knee-jerk of fear. They cornered people in bathrooms and back alleys and under the bleachers. Half the school was in counseling; the _counselors_ were in counseling. It was hell on the electrical wiring.

And then Todd Zelenski was found dead at the drinking fountain, drowned in two inches of water.

Everyone knew Danny Fenton had been near or at the sites of most of the attacks. Everyone knew Danny Fenton had been acting weird.

Danny Fenton and associates decided it would be wise to get the hell out of Chicago.

The consulting company Mrs. Fenton worked for (she determined if pharmaceuticals were safe for human testing) had a lab in Amity Park. They’d been trying to get good researchers out to the suburbs for years, and the pay was better even if the resources were worse, so she didn’t take much convincing. Jack Fenton was an independent inventor at that point, so he could wander wither the wind blew. Jasmine Fenton was in college. So they moved to Amity, and all summer, it seemed like it was going to work out. Chicago was murder city, while Amity was lucky to see the occasional downtown stabbing; the restless came less and, when they did, were less angry than confused. For a while Danny could breathe, and hope against hope that things would be easier from now on.

He’d definitely jinxed himself. Hope was a scam.

The one “good” thing, according to Danny, about this current ectoplasmic upwelling was that the ghosts (he’d met two: Amber and now Schulker) were _very_ recently dead. Old ghosts were much worse; they seemed to _degrade_ , stewing in their restlessness, bearing less and less psychological and physical resemblance to their living templates as time went on.

At this point, Sam interrupted the flow of the story, frowning. Outside the closet, a group of students passed, most likely coming in from lunch. Their loud laughter was muffled and distorted by the closet door. “So what exactly _are_ ghosts? Like, are they actual souls, or, like, echoes or something?”

Danny made a vague handwave-y gesture. “Unfortunately, when I died I was not given a manual. Right now, we’re thinking a sort of remnant. More than an echo, but, like…ugh, it’s hard to explain.” Sam readjusted her crossed ankles, pulling the bottom one onto the top, as he continued. “I used to think of it as similar to the way a star’s light can reach Earth millennia after it died, so we’re seeing a version of what it was even though temporally, that star doesn’t exist in the moment that we’re experiencing; it could have died before our great-grandparents were born. And since light gets refracted and lost on the journey through space, what we’re seeing is a slightly corrupted version. But that’s not a great analogy, because some ghosts actually do seem able to, like, _learn,_ or at least adapt to changing circumstances. Starlight that reaches Earth will never be anything more than what it was when it was first generated light years ago.”

He paused for a breath after that spiel and frowned thoughtfully. “Also,” he added, “since light travels and your brain processes it and stuff, you never actually see anything or anyone as exactly what it is in the instant you perceive it.”

“Huh.”

They sat with that for a minute.

Then Sam snapped her fingers. The light flickered, and Tucker hoped it wasn’t one of the bugs in the cover moving, maybe roused from rigor mortis by all their talk of undeath. “I got it! They’re more like banana candy. You know, Tuck, from that text post you sent me.”

“Oh, yeah!” Tucker remembered thinking, rightly, that the goth in Sam would like the concept. “I read that the flavoring they use for a lot of banana-flavored candies was actually based, when it was invented, on the taste of a species of banana that then went extinct,” he explained to Danny. “So when you eat those candies, you’re actually tasting a long-dead type of banana.”

“And!” Sam added, straightening excitedly, “the recipe could’ve been changed over the years—like, a little more of this, less of that—so that little by little the taste changed! But there aren’t any more of the original banana species, so we have no way of knowing anymore if that’s really what they tasted like, when they were alive.”

Danny grinned. “Well, but humans share more that half their DNA with bananas. So by that logic, I’m totally norm—”

“What are you doing in my closet?!”

There was a general clatter and clash as all three teenagers scrambled to their feet in the small space, knocking at least three unidentified cleaning-related objects off of the shelves and sending the shelving unit itself rocking in a very unnerving way. The door was being held open by an older man in work pants and a tee shirt. He also held a broom and looked extremely exasperated under a stubble goatee. The badge hung on a lanyard around his neck said “J. Klein, Janitor.” It dawned on Tucker that he was, in fact, the janitor.

When none of them answered (they just stared at him with a deer-in-the-headlights sort of look), Mr. Klein sighed gustily and hit a button on the walkie-talkie hanging next to his badge. “Just caught two more kids making out in my maintenance closet,” he intoned in a dry, husky voice. “I deserve a raise for dealing with this crap every day.”

 _Two more?_ Tucker looked to his left, over Sam’s shoulder. Danny just…wasn’t there. _What the hell?_

Sam stumbled into him suddenly, and then she and Tucker made wide-eyed eye contact. _Woah,_ she mouthed.

Tucker decided to focus on the issue at hand. He put on his best “aw, shucks” grin. “Sorry, Mr. Klein, we were just curious about what was in here, and the door was open! I swear we’ve only been here for a few minutes. And we weren’t making out. Really.”

Sam made a _“gross”_ face. “Yeah, Mr. Sunshine here is not my type. He thinks he’s funny.”

A muffled snort emanated from thin air near Tucker’s head.

Klein _harrumphed,_ but there was a slight crease in his stubble on one end _._ “Whatever you say, kid. As long as the lock isn’t damaged I couldn’t care less. Now get going.”

“Thank you, sir!” Tucker declared enthusiastically. They hurried out of the closet past Mr. Klein and into the hallway, stopping about 20 feet away. Mr. Klein glared at them until they got to some arbitrary safe distance, then grabbed a rag and a new 409 spray bottle off the shelves, closing and very deliberately locking the closet door with one more pointed glance at them before he left.

“Heh. That was hilarious,” said Danny’s voice from directly behind them. Tucker and Sam both whirled to see him leaning smugly against a wall that a second ago had been entirely empty. Tucker’s increasingly unreliable sixth sense chose _that_ moment to spark up taser-to-the-kidney style and then die down again to a low nerve-fluttering hum.

They stood there for a moment. Tucker slowly nodded, assimilating _that_ ability into his new reality. “...So. That went...well?”

“He didn’t eat us,” Sam pointed out with a shrug, in a surprised-but-approving tone of voice.

Danny gave her a _look_ but let it pass. “Anyway. I think you guys sort of get the gist of how this stuff can ruin your life, right? So in the future you stay out of my stuff, I’ll stay out of yours? And no more summoning, please, you don’t know how close you were to catching me in the shower—”

“Wait,” Sam said. “You don’t understand, we have to deal with this case—”

“—But there’s no reason we can’t take a supporting role!” Tucker interjected hurriedly. “Very small. Minuscule. Like, an extra’s role. I’ll be a tree.”

“Uh, okay?” Danny absentmindedly rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and held out the other for a joking handshake. Tucker grasped it to shake emphatically, as if the universe might consider that an official transfer of cosmic responsibility.

He felt a shock, like Danny had one of those prank buzzers in his palm.

Tucker crumpled.

Distantly he heard a panicked voice say _“Holy—I swear that wasn’t me!”_ and a slightly less overtly freaking out one respond _“I mean, Tucker’s psychic, so this might be a thing that just happens?”_ and then the first one to say _“Wait. Tucker’s_ psychic?!” _Oh yeah,_ he thought faintly with one side of his brain, _I guess we totally forgot to tell him about that._ The other side of his brain was stuffed with cotton and pine needles that scratched and poked at his occipital lobe.

He looked blearily around from his position on the threadbare carpet. His vision warped and darkened, and he realized he wasn’t sitting on the same floor he’d just fallen on.

He was somewhere dark, with stale air and thin smoke and a warm but not penetrating orange glow. He started to roll onto his side and yelped, snatching his hand back to his chest, when it hit something that burned. He craned his neck and focused blurry eyes and saw that he was surrounded by a circle of white candles.

He struggled to focus more, past the nausea, and look past the circle of lights. Barely visible walls, carpet stains—a boot. He looked up with a sinking feeling and saw bulky camouflage and a dirty beard.

Something hissed, drawing his attention to the outside of the circle to his left. He tried to sit all the way up, but his limbs were vague unwieldy instruments and he could not will them into reacquiring the dexterity of millennia of evolution; his synapses just weren’t firing. _Even my nervous system’s nervous,_ he thought, and laughed inside his head. To his left, he finally saw, was the blue-haired girl. Amber. _Remember,_ he thought she mouthed, but maybe it was just the way her skin was swimming. At his feet, directly in front of him beyond the candles, the grey fox sat perfectly still. They all stared at each other, in silence, while the flames crackled merrily. The air was still. After all, no one was breathing.

_If you wanna make the world, a better place…_

The hunter smiled.

Then the grey fox made a little mewling sound, shifted, and scratched its left ear with its back foot, dismissing them all.

Tucker surged upward, gasping for air, in the brightly lit school hallway. Strong arms grabbed him and held him upright as he coughed violently, his whole body heaving with the force of it. It wouldn’t stop, and Tucker wondered frantically why he couldn’t catch his breath until he realized he was talking, his lips curling and lungs straining around words he couldn’t even make out. With effort, he swallowed whatever had been coming next. “What…?”

It took a few seconds, but he finally caught his breath and was able to put his hands back and support himself on them, grounding himself in the feeling of worn, crumb-strewn carpet, and a few seconds later Sam let him go, sitting back herself with a worried crease between her eyebrows. “I’m fine,” he managed breathlessly. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure, dude?” she answered, sounding just as haggard as he undoubtedly looked. Flyaway hairs stood out all around her face. “You just _collapsed._ I think you were unconscious for a second there. Danny went to get the nurse, should I…?”

“Nah, I think it was” — _breathe—_ “a psychic thing. Definitely. I saw—what was I saying?”

Sam frowned at him and folded her legs to the side with the aid of one hand. She took another second to visibly check him over before answering. “You said, ‘Schulker, he’s not human. He’s not human. He’s not—’ and then you cut off.”

“...What the hell?” Tucker wheezed out. “I don’t remember saying that; I don’t even know how I _know_ that.”

But he did know it, he realized. He’d known it since he’d first met the thing that was and wasn’t a hunter. It was that instinct, that prey animal adrenaline rush, the physical, chemical manifestation of the word “run.” Amber was scary, but Schulker was paralyzing.

He couldn’t believe he was about to say this. “...Heckity-heckin’ crap,” he said in tones of wonder. “I think we need to do another summoning.”

“Are we making Danny help this time?”

Sam still looked frazzled, but at the concept of less talking and more _action,_ a smile was now playing around the edges of her upper lip, creeping up to her nose and flaring the nostril with the almost-invisible piercing hole her parents didn’t know she had. It made Tucker smile to look at her. “Yeah, we’re definitely making Danny help this time.”

She grinned. “I’ll bring the lemon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> after this chapter I've decided to scrap my 20-chapter outline and take the fic in an exciting new direction: we will now be focusing entirely on the adventures of J. Klein, Janitor, the hero we didn't know we needed.


	10. Dissembling and Dissemination

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Danny is skeptical. Tucker is quietly (and occasionally loudly) terrified. Sam is bordering on gleeful, which should have everyone worried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uhh hey so there's some kinda gross throwing up in this chapter. just so you know. its very quick, but it's decently gross. if that freaks you out you might want to skip from "For a count of ten, all was still." to "When he opened them, the candles were out and the hunter was in the circle."

Dissembling and Dissemination

_ or alternatively:  _ That’s Not How You Do Zumba

Sam slapped her phone down on the counter hard enough to make Tucker nervous. “He’s a wendigo.”

“A what?”

They were in Sam’s kitchen, having decided to spread the risk of opening a hellmouth through repeated summonings over a larger geographic area. Tucker’s house was cursed enough. Plus, Sam’s house was empty on Tuesday afternoons—her mom’s charity thingies kept her out of the way.

“A wendigo,” Sam repeated. “It’s a monster from Algonquian tradition. Supposedly, if you break a taboo, you turn into this insane thing that consumes human flesh.”

“Okay?” Tucker allowed. “Your evidence. Lay it on me.”

“Schulker is a hunter; he’s from Eastern Canada, where the legend originated; and the case he was suspected in involved the cannibalization of two hikers.”

“Okayy….”

_ “And  _ wendigos are thought to symbolize greed and destruction of nature. Schulker is a  _ hunter.” _

Tucker shot her a sidelong glance. “Stop bringing your crazy vegan sensibilities into my murder investigation. Was the dude even Algonquian?”

“No clue,” Sam admitted. “But why would a curse like this only apply to people from one, like, language group?”

“I don’t know, didn’t you say something during our first summoning about how you think the key to the supernatural is belief?”

“Tucker, I was completely talking out of my ass.”

“Fair.” A pause. “So we have an extremely unlikely theory. How does this help us?”

“Line of questioning?” Sam smirked. “It  _ does _ give us an excuse to make more jokes about eating people around Danny.”

Tucker swung his Converse against the wood panelling beneath the pristine dark marble of Sam’s parents’ counter and snorted involuntarily. “Sam, do not antagonize the unpredictable paranormal creature we just met.” He glanced around, taking in an overabundance of natural light gleaming off of various polished metal kitchen instruments. Sam’s kitchen had glass sliding doors taking up most of one wall, looking out into her sprawling backyard, which was kept from sprawling too much by high, dark hedges. Most of the yard was covered in immaculately maintained lawn, but the ferns toward the back bordered on chaotically overgrown, and there were a few ripped-up patches of lawn where squirrels had buried things, or unearthed them. Tucker liked Sam’s backyard a lot better than he liked her house. He got the feeling she did, too.

“You know, if Schulker is a supernatural monster….” Sam twirled idly on socked feet. She was clearly more accustomed than Tucker to the slidiness of the walnut hardwood floor; Tucker slipped at least once every time he was over. (Granted, not all of those “accidents” were unintentional.) “That could be the reason he was targeted.”

“Then what about the other victims? You went over to Kwan’s house and ate his mom’s popcorn. She most definitely was not a monster!” Tucker found himself a little affronted for this woman he’d never met. “And besides, you said that I only said that  _ Skulker  _ wasn’t human during the mini-trance.”

“Dude, I don’t know! I’m just theorizing!” Sam  _ almost _ glared.

_ Woah. That was weird. _ They both took a breath.

Into that quiet, a doorbell rang.

Sam spun again, grinning. “Yes!” She hurried dangerously fast out of the kitchen and down an equally slippery hallway.

By the time Tucker’d pulled back on his beret and caught up, Sam had already opened the door to admit their reluctant guest. Danny stood in the doorway with a backpack over one shoulder, fidgeting with a small orb full of silvery liquid. He visibly startled when he spotted Tucker over Sam’s head.

“Heyyy, dude.” Tucker advanced slowly down the entrance hall.

“Hey, man, you okay?” Danny had switched in an instant from glaring to concerned. With a start, Tucker realized that the last time Danny had seen him had been during the whole fainting episode. Sam must not have filled him in.

“Oh, yeah. It was a psychic thing.” Tucker would have shared more, but he was caught off guard by the question, and Sam pounced on his momentary pause like a housecat on a sunbeam, finally free to ask a million more questions of their best and only source on the supernatural. “So what makes a summoning work? Do you have to have someone’s specific runes? And does it have to be Nordic runes?”

Danny shifted, still uncomfortably standing on the stoop. “Uhh, okay. You need someone’s combination of symbols or their blood to summon them involuntarily. The ‘number’ can be in a lot of languages–I think regular Arabic numerals might even work in a pinch–but the language has gotta be really old, and the more letters or numbers the better, statistically speaking. You can also get them to agree to come with an offering of some sort that’s, like, specific to them.”

“Wait, back up–blood?”

He gave her a cautious look, apparently considering his next words carefully. “Yeah, dead man’s blood has a lot of…interesting qualities.”

If this was allowed to continue, they’d never make it through the door. Tucker scanned their surroundings for a distraction. “What’s that?” He pointed at the silver ball.

“I asked him if he had something with mercury. Something better than a thermometer,” Sam piped up, positively beaming.

Danny, in contrast, scowled. He stepped past Sam, over the house’s threshold. (Tucker made a mental note to ask Sam if she’d said anything at all inviting-y. For science purposes.) “You’re way too cheerful for two people blackmailing a guy into performing a séance.”

“Woah, we are  _ not _ blackmailing you!” Tucker squeaked just a little on “not.” Then he reconsidered and darted a glance at Sam as she closed and locked the door. “Are we?”

They all started migrating at a more sedate pace down the hall, Tucker making sure not to brush into Danny and risk another psychic trance/damsel-in-distress fainting spell. “Okay, I  _ may _ have implied some things,” Sam admitted without a smidgen of actual remorse on her face. “But he chose how to interpret those implications.”

“So I’m not being blackmailed?” Danny stopped and raised a dubious eyebrow, leaning backpack-first against one creamy wall.

“It’s all a matter of interpretation.”

“No. No, we are not blackmailing you. We’re not going to reveal you. We promise,” Tucker reassured him hurriedly. “Pay no attention to the maniac with the black lipstick.”

Danny seemed a bit stumped by this turn of events. “Oh. Okay? Uh, then I really think you should not be doing this. This thing you’re about to do? Like” –he turned to Tucker– “you, at least, have to realize this is  _ crazy.” _

Sam gave him a look. “Weren’t you just saying that this is what you  _ do?” _

“I mean, yeah, sure, I’ve fought a  _ dead _ serial killer before. But a living one is entirely different!”

Tucker started to clarify that the killer  _ wasn’t  _ necessarily alive, but he was cut off by a skeptical Sam. “Wouldn’t a living one be easier?” she asked.

Danny glared at her. “It’d better be. The dead one kicked my ass,” he muttered. Tucker let his point drift off into the emptiness of Sam’s spacious living room.

He also let him _ self _ drift toward the back of the group, considering which bag of supplies to pick up as Sam gave Danny an abbreviated tour of the first floor. Tucker had always found her habit of going into hostess mode funny, and a little endearing. She did it at school, too; she loved giving freshmen directions. It was also, weirdly enough, the only habit Sam had that reminded Tucker of her mom. (That’s why he’d never mentioned it to her—he didn’t want her to try to stop.)

Eventually, they all grabbed plastic grocery bags of candles and herbs and tromped upstairs to Sam’s mom’s personal gym. It was a quarter past 5, twilight just setting in deceptively slowly. A golden sort of early evening, rather than a purple one; the kind favored by lazy bees and honeysuckle vines rather than night-blooming flowers and cactus buds. Inside the gym, that type of evening translated to long amber shadows on light wood floors, and glowing faces looking out, startled, from the huge mirrors covering one wall. The whole room was about 30 foot square, the mirrored wall adorned with the stereotypical ballet handrail (probably the result of wishful thinking on Sam’s parents’ part) and the adjoining one with large, austere windows, looking out on the same backyard view as the kitchen. Sam kept up a constant stream of questions as they set everything down. 

Once Sam had chalked out a preliminary circle on the floor, several feet wider than the last one, Tucker started setting candles around the outside. Danny leaned against the door and glowered uncomfortably for a minute before giving in and helping Tucker out.

“For the record,” he commented when Sam paused for breath, “I’m only doing this because in the only-somewhat-likely event that this summoning  _ did _ work, I would be yoinked inside the triangle again anyways.”

“What about us not getting murdered? Doesn’t factor into your motivations at all?” Sam prodded absently from her place on the floor.

“Well, you do still owe me ten bucks for the slushees.”

Once the pentacle (this time with, Tucker noticed, a few more sigils of some sort inside and outside, and a bowl of the silvery herb that had affected Danny easily accessible within) and triangle were completed, the candles were lit and reflecting off the floor, and the gym absolutely  _ reeked  _ of sandalwood (with faint undertones of something more cloying, older, that Danny claimed made his nose itch), Sam and Tucker finally stepped into the circle. Danny threw them one more dirty look, sighed, and stepped with exaggerated caution into the triangle, settling onto the floor cross-legged. Tucker understood that throwing up ghosts on demand was not anyone’s idea of a fun after-school activity, but he still thought the attitude was a little unwarranted. They’d given him a pretty roomy triangle this time, with room for about six Dannies to sit comfortably. Just as Sam had unlocked her phone and was opening her mouth to start the versicle, he seemed to remember something. “Oh, yeah, sorry, before you start, I should probably remind you, I know my ghost form is a little disturbing? So, like, if I change suddenly, just...don’t freak out.”

“Dude, I’m already freaking out,” Tucker not-entirely-joked. “Freaking out is the baseline right now.”

“Fair. Uh, then I guess just don’t run? I’m very fast, and I can smell fear.”

Sam and Tucker regarded him in identical abject horror.

_ “Kidding! _ I’m kidding! I mean, I am fast. And I guess technically–anyway, I swear, ‘ghost me’ is internally more or less ‘regular me.’ There is zero possibility I’m gonna hurt you.”

Tucker plopped carefully into one of the open spaces in the pentacle. “You know how I was acting before like I wasn’t very scared? This is making me  _ very scared!” _

“Okay! Okay, my bad, just say the evocation, Sam.” 

Sam gave him one more weird look and then started into the versicle. “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in!" she proclaimed in a ringing tone Tucker recognized as her finishing-up-a-particularly-good-rebuttal debate voice. She quickly tapped her phone screen, pulling up a different tab. “Papa Legba, Saint Peter, Hermanubis, Keeper of the Gate, Lord of the Hidden Road Between Life and Death, I call on you….” Nothing visibly changed, but Tucker could feel a shift in the air, like the pressure change indicating the onset of a cold front. Danny subtly poked a finger into the space above the chalk line and winced when it rebounded, shaking out his hand at the wrist.

“...For I would traffick with the departed.”

For a count of ten, all was still.

Then Danny’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell sideways onto the floor. He started choking, loudly, and shaking with increasing violence. Tucker, watching with a kind of horrified, detached fascination, saw light start to burst from his body once, then twice, only to just as quickly extinguish. Danny himself remained apparently human, fighting to hold himself up on his forearms as the seizures accelerated and something splattered out of his mouth and nose and onto Sam’s mom’s hardwood floor beneath him.

After a few seconds of uneasy eyeing, Tucker set aside the potential dangers of breaking silence and whispered to Sam, “Dude, this does not look right…Is he okay? Is this supposed to happen?”

“No idea.” Sam stepped carefully to the edge of the circle nearest the triangle, revulsion and fear tugging at her lips. The last ray of sunlight through the windows glanced off the near edge of her face, turning her temple and the arc of her cheek into something flat and artificial, the curving side of a violin with black hairs for strings. Then the light slipped off, and away.

Danny was fully on the ground now, curling around horrible, hacking coughs. The pool of ooze and gristle on the floor with him flowed and writhed. Tucker’s heart pounded hard enough that he felt shaky on his feet; he could barely hear his breath. Then, with a start, he recognized the breaking-glass noise from the last summoning, at first hidden behind the retching but steadily becoming louder, until he was forced to cover his ears. Out of the corner of his eye, by dim candlelight, he saw Sam do the same. He closed his eyes on instinct, and terror.

When he opened them, the candles were out and the hunter was in the circle.

Tucker’s nightmare sense went  _ crazy  _ as the ambient temperature dropped about thirty degrees. Schulker himself was also icier than the last two times. Dim, skittering moonlight revealed in flashes the tiny icicles hung from his beard, and his fingers, hanging where he’d hooked his thumbs in his belt, looked purple. Frostbitten.

“Well, thank you very much for the call!” Schulker enthused in a voice that rasped and echoed in equal measure. “I took care of our little…access problem” –he gestured to Danny, who Tucker hadn’t noticed was lying on the floor behind Schulker, apparently dead to the world (heh, it was so petrifying it was hilarious)– “so we should be able to talk at length, little seer. You got a question for me?”

_ Shit.  _ Tucker hoped Danny was alright. Now he had yet another reason to end this as soon as possible, beyond the looming, increasing risk of a premature heart attack. “Uh. Yes. Sir. So, uh, were….” Tucker licked his lips. “Were you a wendigo?”

There was silence in the room for a minute, beyond the cracking of ice. In the dim light, Schulker was less a person and more a huge mound of grey and black. A mountaintop in silhouette–the suggestion of a head–tilted slightly to the side and considered Tucker for a long moment.

Finally, the spirit looked down. Tucker’s eyes started to adjust to the low light, revealing that he had taken his thumbs out of his belt and was examining his fingernails. “Wechuge, actually. Bigger, smarter, harder to do in, and more of a possession sorta situation usually. I didn’t want to play by their rules, so I made me a contract. But eh, technicalities.” He smiled. It was just barely visible. It was not a nice smile.

Tucker was keenly aware of how hard he was shaking. Sam shifted, stepping subtly in front of him and brushing against his arm. He could feel that her hand was sweaty, but her voice didn’t waver as she raised her chin regally and pronounced, “Who killed you?”

The hunter idly scratched his beard, dislodging a few beads of ice and a small flurry of snowflakes to melt on the carpet. “Dunno. Prey knew its stuff, though. Went through the whole campfire rigamarole ‘n whatnot. And after all that work I put into gettin’ stronger.”

“Uh…” Tucker dared another quick glance at Sam. No dice. For the first time (but not the last), Tucker wondered why they didn’t bother coming up with interview questions before going to all this trouble. Finally, he settled on “Is there anything else you’d like to, uh, tell us?” His voice cracked  _ hard  _ on “tell.”

The hunter’s smile stretched wide, like a dog’s. Something squirmed in his purple gums. “There’s a storm coming, kid. We can feel it, over here on our side–or at least I can, thanks to my friend. I smell it, through the rot. Ozone and abracadabra and all that  _ merde.”  _

“Uhh.” Sam’s voice was high and thin. “Could you be more specific?”

“Maybe I wanna wait and see how it plays out.”

Tucker nodded. Swallowed. The room dropped another few degrees, and the gym floors had started to become caked in black frost. Tucker decided enough was enough; his gut didn’t like the way Schulker was looking at his throat instead of his eyes, the way one boot edged  _ just  _ over the chalk line. “I–okay. Th–thank you. Now, um, sir, could you, um, please leave?”

The boot crossed the line.

The hunter stalked out of the circle and slowly forward until he loomed over Tucker, who found himself as frozen as the man’s beard as he watched, wide-eyed. The hunter stopped right in front of him, looming overhead so Tucker could better appreciate the almost animalistic planes of his face. He laughed once, scorn heavy in his tone. “Happy to oblige, little seer.” He turned, knelt, and pressed his thumb flat between Danny’s eyes, and then he was gone, the only trace of his presence melting slowly on Mrs. Manson’s floor.

The candles snapped back to life.

Their glow, though Tucker couldn’t decide if it was cheery or eerie, at least illuminated their immediate surroundings. The dark shadows in the corners of the room contained nothing but shadow, and the mirror wall reflected only their own wide eyes, faces lit orange from beneath. Tucker started to step toward Danny, who was still slumped on the floor, but Sam grabbed his arm. Her fingernails dug into his skin. “Wait. The door isn’t closed yet.”

Sam hacked up her lemon with a shaky hand and recited the gate-closing verse, tossing around a few generous handfuls of the herb from her bowl for good measure as she snuffed the candles. They both hesitated for a moment on the boundary line of the darkened circle, looking around. Silent, empty space had never seemed so perilous. They teetered on the edge.

Then Danny coughed and pushed himself up. “Sh—shit, what…happened. What—” He bolted upright, looking around wildly. “Where is he?! Is he still here?” His eyes glowed green, and his movement, as he pushed himself to his feet with his fists clenched, was just a little too smooth.

“We think—” Tucker gulped, spoke louder. “We think he’s gone. We banished him.”

“Okay. I’m just gonna. Just gonna check.” He shot them another careful look, and then with a flash of white light Danny was replaced by the  _ thing  _ from the first summoning. In the dark, his skin glowed like a dim paper lantern; his facial features were indistinct except for the pitch-black suggestion of that wide, wide mouth. It moved as he spoke, in a crackling voice.  _ “Okay. Don’t freak out. I don’t see him, or feel him. I think he’s gone.” _

When no answer followed this reassurance, he twirled back like a beta fish to find Sam and Tucker openly staring at him. Something abruptly changed in the way he stood; though he’d never left the ground, he seemed to get  _ heavier,  _ settling more firmly into his gravitational niche. The light brightened and extinguished again, and human Danny was back in the other thing’s place, green eyes like a glowstick in the dark.

Sam was the first to recover this time. She swallowed. “Well then.” She swallowed again. “Uhh, I guess we’d better get rid of this circle. Before my dad gets home. Did anyone remember to pack Clorox wipes?”

Tucker didn’t take his eyes off Danny. With painstaking slowness, he stepped out of the circle. Paused for a moment.  _ Sprinted  _ for the light switch.

Under fluorescents, it all seemed a little ridiculous: the arcane figures scrawled on the gym floor where Sam’s mom did Zumba, the kid from school who joked that he made MUN a “paranormal activity,” and even Tucker’s own slowly subsiding heart palpitations. He laughed once, a little hysterical, a little embarrassed. “Nope.” He turned, paused. “Hey, Danny?”

“Yeah?”

“Sch—...the ghost who was just here, he said he did something so you couldn’t, like, portal him away or whatever. And then you had some sort of seizure and didn’t transform. Um. Has that ever happened before?”

“...No.”

“Huh,” Sam said, traces of a shaky rattle still audible in her voice. “Maybe because he was a wechuge?”

“Wait, he was a  _ what?” _

Sam looked at a squinting Danny, suddenly nonplussed. “Well, we knew he was _ something. _ Tucker psychic-ed it.”

“Tucker psychicked–” Danny ran a hand through his hair. Took a moment. Breathed. “For god’s sake,  _ share your information!” _

~(*0*)~

“Seriously? Ghosts just kind of tell you things?!” Danny groaned. “This is so unfair. I complain about my vital condition not coming with an instruction manual, and then Tucker’s ability is that he literally  _ is  _ a cosmic instruction manual. Or at least a scavenger hunt hints sheet.”

“That’s the way the cookie crumbles, my friend,” Tucker ventured, perhaps less hesitantly than he might have earlier in the evening. Sam and Tucker were sitting on Sam’s bed at 7 p.m., excavating a box of Double Stuf Oreos. Danny perched precariously above them, on top of Sam’s tall headboard. Sam’s room was mostly a purple-and-black nightmare, with occasionally the merest suggestion of taste-–the subtle lilac walls, for example, or the round rug woven from various textiles that added just enough color to deter accusations of dichromaticism. A striking painting of a field at late sunset was framed next to a poster of a middlingly popular death metal band hailing from somewhere with fjords, and on the adjoining wall a window revealed dark trees, their limbs swaying in a low wind. As Tucker made his way absently through another Oreo (sugary inside layer first, of course. He and Sam had fought many battles over this. Again, Sam had no taste), he watched his phone screen darken as the outgoing call to his cousin connected. He hit the speaker button with his pinky.

The ringer filled the room like the sound of a tiny, tinny jackhammer at work.  _ Thunk.  _ “Hey.”

“Hey, Tristan,” Tucker said false-cheerily. “How’s life as a kebab?”

“That was  _ extremely  _ insensitive.”

“Yeah, I just had to summon a ghostly cannibalistic monster because you procrastinated. I’m not feeling sympathetic.”

“Damn, you summoned something?” Tristan sounded interested in spite of himself. “What did you learn?”

“Very little,” Sam monotoned.

“Yep,” Tucker confirmed. “We wanted to run some theories by you, though. ‘Cuz we’re–I guess we’re kind of running out of ideas?”

“Go ahead.”

Tucker bit his lip. This was going to be awkward. “Okay, so Sam suggested that the killer is going after people who have been convicted or suspected of crimes. Schulker and Technus both were, and you, and Sam said Amber was sketchy?”

There was a pause. “I’ve never been charged with anything.”

“Yeah, but there was that thing with that girl...a while ago….”

Tristan’s tone abruptly changed. “Are you  _ kidding me?!”  _ he gritted out. “I put that behind me, you  _ know  _ it was a mistaken—”

“I know, I know!” Tucker cut in. “But this  _ killer  _ might not know! Okay? That’s all we’re saying.”

An audible breath came through the phone. Then another, this one less labored. “Oh. I guess...I guess that does kind of make sense...Amber  _ was _ a low-level dealer for a big chunk of my grade and the one above it. Mostly prescription pills, but she could get you weed and some other stuff if you asked for it.” Tristan paused. “But the only people who would really know that, and know about my thing…are people from school.”

There was a horrified silence, and then Danny breathed, “A  _ student?” _

“Or a teacher. Or administration,” Sam added.

Tristan chuckled softly, likely in disbelief at how preposterous their lives had become. Or maybe Tucker was just projecting. “Yeah…and I always caught a  _ lot  _ of whiffs of the paranormal around Casper. If I were you, I would start by just keeping an eye out for people acting weird.” Tucker shifted on the bedspread. Sam held half an Oreo hovering near her head, apparently forgotten. “Uh, by the way, who’s that with you?”

The temperature in the room dropped a few degrees. Literally. Tucker directed a dirty look at Danny, who cringed and mouthed  _ “sorry.” _ He cleared his throat and focused his attention back on the phone in his lap. “Nobody...nobody important.”

Now  _ Danny  _ was glaring. Tucker shrugged exaggeratedly and mouthed  _ “what did you  _ want  _ me to say?!”  _ Sam snickered into her Oreo.

“Really?” Tristan started. “Because he’s giving me the psychic heebie jeebies even just over the phone—”

“You’ve been super helpful, thanks so much, bye!” Sam leaned over Tucker’s lap and ended the call.

Danny gathered in his socked feet and then stood up on Sam’s headboard, pacing back and forth and absently running fingers along the ceiling a few inches above his head. Tucker had a sudden, wild impulse to throw an Oreo at him, and see if that would short out the freaky preternatural grace. “So it’s someone at school,” Danny reflected. “I don’t think I’m gonna be much help since I don’t know what’s normal there yet, but I have a limited sense for when undead stuff is nearby, and I could do some invisible snooping.”

That was a quick about-face–apparently Danny was now completely on board with their investigation. Tucker wasn’t going to be the one to mention it. “How many kids are in the school, 550 or so?” he asked instead. “We can probably rule out freshmen, and maybe sophomores.”

“Yeah, my money’s on a teacher,” Sam mused.

Danny stopped abruptly, frowning. “Wait, but how could it be someone from Amity if the first two murders happened in Chicago?”

Sam and Tucker groaned in unison. Sam bounced to her feet, almost sending the Oreo box to the floor, and turned to face the bed. “This is so irritating! Every time we come up with a decent theory, there’s one or two details that completely destroy it. I don’t know if it’s because we just don’t have enough information about the victims or because we’re missing something big, but it’s  _ immensely  _ frustrating.” She gesticulated with extra force on “immensely.”

Tucker took a calming breath and dug his toes into the fringe on Sam’s rug. “I think we need to stop theorizing until we have some actual  _ data.  _ We’re trying to fit the facts to our theories, but we don’t even have enough facts.” They considered for a minute. On Tucker’s left, the windowsill halved a rising moon, and the silhouetted trees tossed more urgently, a few notches below panic. Just a few.

Danny dropped soundlessly to the floor. “Okay, so let’s make a plan. We’re going to get more information, we’re going to figure it out, and then we’re going to nail this scumbag to the wall.”

Tucker waited a second, then prompted, “...By telling the police.”

“The police. Right. Definitely.”


	11. The Fortress, Assailed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tucker, Sam, and Danny are complete snoops. Who doesn't have something to hide?

The Fortress, Assailed

_ or alternatively: _ This Cannot Fairly Be Called Intelligence Work

All of Wednesday the 25th was spent snooping. Unsuccessfully snooping, to clarify. Tucker and Sam lurked in doorways and listened in on any and all conversations in every period, and at lunch they agreed to hang out with their respective sophomore and senior friends to get a bead on those populations. Danny lurked much more subtly (he was good at that) in hallways and empty rooms, making use of the slightly enhanced hearing he’d reluctantly admitted to that morning. Nothing. Danny and Tucker did both report a ping or two on their respective radars, now that they were paying attention, but they weren’t able to identify the specific people who gave them those reactions; Tucker’s “ick” sense was much stronger and seemed to be more precise, but all he could say at the end of the day was that it had been someone in his computer science class and at least one sophomore. Tucker had also forgotten to do his physics homework what with the whole séance thing, so he lost brownie points with Mr. Marcel. Not a great day overall.

Despite Sam and Tucker’s strategizing session in the car before school, Thursday looked to be turning out the same for the first hour and a half after the bell. Seeing as that carpool war room discussion had involved Sam taking her mind off the road and, several times, her hands off the wheel (to “gesture more eloquently”), Tucker now felt obligated to turn up results as soon as possible, if only to justify having risked the lives and limbs of all of the drivers on their route that day. Nonetheless, nothing out of the ordinary caught anyone’s eye until second period—English, the one class they all had together. The classroom smelled like ham today, the grey light through the windows barely supplemented the flickering fluorescents, and the historical quote posters on the walls seemed to be sagging more than usual. Just as Lancer was winding down a very long and vaguely propagandistic speech about Quiroga’s use of narrative voice, something bounced off the side of Tucker’s beret.

He glanced around in confusion and caught Danny’s wide, purposeful eyes. Danny nodded toward a small piece of paper crumpled on the ground next to Tucker’s sneaker. After checking to make sure Lancer was still occupied (he’d taken to diagramming on the board while continuing to talk, with effort, over one shoulder. Geez, someday soon the guy was going to end up in a neck brace), Tucker folded painfully over the bar connecting his chair to his desk and snagged the note off the tiles.

In capital letters, bolded by somebody’s re-scribbling all of the lines several times with a dying pen, it read, “DASH SMELLS FUNNY.” The message was underlined twice.

Tucker’s first reaction was to snicker under his breath. Then his brain caught up to him. He stared again at the two emphatic lines under the sentence, then looked up, wide-eyed, back at Danny, who nodded furiously. Danny, who was seated right behind the hulking red-sweatered monstrosity known colloquially as Dash. Danny, who had supernatural senses.

And come to think of it, Dash’s very presence  _ had  _ always terrified Tucker, hadn’t it? Dash set off his fight-or-flight response just by being in the room. Now Tucker was forced to ask himself whether that really was just instinct born of painful experience…or something more.

He passed the note on to Sam the moment Lancer seemed fully absorbed in his diagrams (drawing a “jungle” that looked more like several heads of broccoli) and watched her proceed through basically the same series of reactions as him, ending with the look of wondering disturbance he himself still wore. After class, they all declined to join the rowdy parade that filed into the hallway, instead lingering in the empty room to confirm their game plan.

“We haunt him,” Danny said decisively. He took a moment to look smug while Tucker and Sam both groaned.

“Phrasing notwithstanding, that’s what Tucker and I were saying in the car,” Sam said. “Follow him around, listen to his conversations, see if anyone else could be involved in whatever he has going on, and try to come up with a plausible excuse to pump him for information.”

“We could just catch him alone and confront him,” Danny hazarded. “I mean, there are three of us, two of whom have supernatural abilities and one of whom has fighting experience.”

“Hey, I did Taekwondo for like three years in elementary school.”

“Okay, one and a half of whom have fighting experience.”

Tucker stuck out a foot to deter Sam in case she really did attack Danny and patiently tuned out her  _ mostly  _ joking rant. When the bickering seemed to be winding down, he jumped in. “Okay, so I’d prefer not to confront a serial killer under any circumstances? Just, like, me personally? Anyway, if we’re wrong he’ll think we’re crazy and tell  _ everyone,  _ which my already fragile street cred definitely won’t survive. And come on, I know he’s a violent asshole, but do you guys really think  _ Dash  _ is capable of murder?”

Danny raised his hands in a casual “don’t shoot me” sort of gesture and stepped back. “I’ve met him exactly once, so I’m going to leave this one to you guys.”

Sam bit her lip. “I don’t know. He can throw a punch, sure, but he was really shaken up when that guy kicked the crap out of him sophomore year. I  _ sincerely _ doubt he’d be capable of killing his best friend’s mom.” She paused, ruminated. “Then again, that’s what everybody says, isn’t it? When you find out Greg down the street is a killer? ‘Oh, but he was such a nice boy, he fed my cats when I was away…’”

“Well, he’s only the first kid we’ve narrowed down with connections to the paranormal; there are at least two more,” Danny pointed out, hiking a hip up onto one of the front desks (perilously, in Tucker’s experience–those desks were tippy) and reinserting himself into the conversation. “And we’re not in any rush.”

Sam frowned, but with purpose this time. “Yeah, true. Okay, we’ll investigate him  _ subtly _ first and see where it goes from there. Most likely he doesn’t have anything to do with the murders and his mom just brought home the wrong Raggedy Ann doll or something.”

“Cursed dolls? Are those a thing?” Tucker felt impelled to ask. He and Sam both turned to Danny.

“I don’t know, probably?! You guys just  _ assume  _ I know all of these things!”

Tucker was midway through pointing out how, from their perspective, that was an entirely rational assumption when the bell rang and two freshmen clattered into the classroom, signalling the end of the five-minute passing period. “Crap, I’m gonna be so late!” he yelped, frantically shoving pens into his bag. His next class was two buildings away. He sprinted out of the classroom, Sam and Danny right behind him, and began the arduous process of shoving and dodging his way through the teeming halls.

~(*0*)~

At lunch Danny, with his slightly better hearing, was the primary lurker. Sam and Tucker sat with him two tables away from Dash, Kwan, Star, Paulina, and two seniors they didn’t know, maintaining a stilted cover conversation to mask the fact that he was eavesdropping. They were in the common area of the school library. Students technically weren’t supposed to eat there, but the librarians had given up on trying to enforce that rule after a year of creative smuggling techniques, and now they just kept the exterminators on speed dial to deal with this week’s mouse or roach infestation before the damages could get too bad. The library had tall ceilings with windows toward the top, so shafts of natural light arced elegantly overhead and almost entirely avoided the inhabited levels. Two rows of freestanding bookshelves standing about six feet high lined the perimeter of the surprisingly small room, and then larger bookshelves lined three of the walls, leaving only one expanse of orange-beige wallpaper uncovered, along with a set of large glass doors. The view they provided of the open courtyard outside just barely prevented the illusion of the library being cramped, since five fake wood tables, all generously tattooed with black carved-in initials and the occasional curse word, took up most of the open floorspace in the middle of the room. All five tables were occupied, so the space was louder than Tucker would’ve considered optimal.

“Okay,” Danny began, squinting and hunching unconsciously over the uneaten sandwich in his hands. “They’re finally getting around to something interesting. Keep talking!”

“Gee, I sure do love  _ The Office,  _ don’t you?” Tucker exclaimed with a wide, plastic grin. Sam groaned and put her face in her hands.

Danny listened in silence for long enough that Tucker was able to finish his cafeteria lasagna without any significant pauses in his and Sam’s extremely natural-sounding conversation. When Dash and Kwan started getting up and collecting their bags to head to football practice, Danny finally freed him from his misery by leaning in with a slightly too-wide grin. Tucker, still watching their targets over Danny’s shoulder, was relieved to see that Dash didn’t spare the eavesdroppers a glance. He tracked Protein Steve and Steroid Stu’s progress–very covertly, he thought–across the library to the doors behind him, and then had to quickly spin back to Sam when Kwan shot their table a confused look while holding the door open for Dash. Still, Tucker didn’t think he’d been caught staring. He relaxed back into his seat.

That’s when he made direct eye contact with Paulina, still sitting with the seniors, over Danny’s shoulder. She raised both perfectly manicured eyebrows expressively.

Tucker quickly lowered his eyes to stare at the middle of the table. Against his will, he felt himself blushing.

Sam gave him a look, but Danny hadn’t noticed, too busy dishing the dirt. “Okay, so mostly they were just talking about weekend plans and some TV show and stuff, but then Kwan started bugging Dash about where he disappeared to a few weeks ago. Apparently he skipped out on a nighttime football game, so they were all giving him a hard time about it, and he didn’t have a good explanation. Then Kwan mentioned that he’s actually blown off their plans a few times with no explanation, always at night. That’s super weird, right?”

“Yeah, that’s  _ really  _ weird,” Sam agreed. “Really convenient that they would talk about it right when we were listening, too. So now we pretty much have to follow him around every night until he does whatever it is again, right? Like, we’re morally obligated.”

“You say that like you’re looking forward to stalking some random high schooler in the long term. Dude, this is going to be  _ so boring.  _ And time consuming. And difficult, logistically.” Tucker pushed aside his lunch tray and slouched into its place on the table, resting his chin on his crossed arms. This way, Danny’s head blocked him from Paulina’s view.

“We can take it in shifts,” Sam defended. “Share the burden.”

“Communist.”

“Hey, wait, I have enough on my plate trying not to get murdered by the undead all the time,” Danny broke in, excitement having given way to petulance at the direction of their conversation. “I’m not doing more than an hour of stalking a week, even if it is for a good cause.”

“For real? But you’re our best lurker!” Tucker attempted to look pitiful. It was ineffective.

“Sam is the goth here; that makes her automatically the best lurker. I’m,  _ at most, _ an incidental emo. Which is significantly better than a voluntary emo.”

Tucker tried a bit longer, but Danny wouldn’t budge, and it was eventually decided that Sam and Tucker would follow Dash after school today and they could figure things out from there.

So that’s what they did. Tucker knew what Dash’s car looked like (grey sedan, nothing special), and it turned out that he parked basically right in front of the main steps, so they waited until that conspicuous red Letterman was halfway out of the parking lot and then peeled out in Sam’s car before decelerating and beginning an uncharacteristically subtle, slow pursuit. Tucker had expected it to feel like he was in an action movie, but the most exciting thing that happened was Dash forgetting to signal before he turned once, meaning Sam had to change lanes in a hurry to keep him in sight. They got excited when they realized he was going toward downtown Amity rather than heading home, but instead of continuing onto the freeway he pulled into the decaying parking lot of the Westside Mall. Sam parked in a space two rows away, front tires kissing a pale cement wheel block that was cracked down the middle, leaving its long, rusty rebar fasteners partially exposed to the air. The parking lot always smelled like wet asphalt and weed.

Dash locked his car and strode through the doors of the mall, absently tossing his keys in the air with a level of coordination Tucker definitely envied. Sam and Tucker followed, waiting until Dash was almost around the corner before coming into the range that would cause the automatic glass doors to slide open—they didn’t want the noise to make him turn around. Then, of course, they had to jog to catch up again, and there was a moment of panic as they turned the corner and thought they’d lost him before Tucker spotted him on the “up” escalator. Luckily, the crowd in the mall was still sparse, probably because it had only been a little under two weeks since a murder victim’s body was found behind the bowling alley. Tucker was stricken with a sudden, morbidly curious urge to go find the dumpster where Schulker had been found. He quickly squashed it.

Tucker and Sam walked very fast and very casually to the escalator, barely giving themselves time to hesitate and make that lightning-quick calculation people always make before stepping onto something in motion. As a result, the mild jolt caught him by surprise. The escalator vibrated slightly, purring, the impression of warmth beneath his feet. Above them, ahead of two teenagers and an older woman in a jacket reminiscent of several famous dictators, Dash stepped off onto an expanse of faux white marble.

They managed to play this game undetected for awhile. Dash bought a smoothie and a pretzel and walked into a bike shop. Their luck ran out exactly 37 minutes after they entered the mall, when Dash walked out of the bike shop and made a beeline for one of the mall’s small indoor seating areas. Tucker and Sam had retired to it after ten minutes of browsing unconvincingly through women’s clothing stores (all the clothes were just slightly out of style) and then discarding the prospect of loitering behind a big marble pillar like complete creeps. The seating area was convenient because it was near the bike shop, it was  _ designed  _ for loitering and therefore wouldn’t earn them weird looks, and it was surrounded by large fake tropical plants in artful pots in hopes that patrons occupying the stained cushions and wicker chairs would feel immersed in nature. The plants weren’t great at accomplishing this effect, but they were very good at screening sitters from view from most angles.

Unfortunately, on this particular occasion they failed in that mission as well. Dash marched right up to the area, shoved aside a few plastic palm fronds, and halted directly in front of Sam and Tucker, who were frozen in the act of getting up to flee. Sam recovered first, casually sliding back to lounge in what was essentially a lawn chair and raising one eyebrow at Dash. Tucker took a moment longer frozen on the edge of his seat, and he settled back much less smoothly into a straight-backed posture he could easily run from.

Dash took in this reaction and snorted. He skipped past any preamble. “Why the fuck are you following me?” he asked, effortlessly looming, like a fortress on a sheer cliff.

Tucker assessed him. He didn’t seem particularly angry; mostly just confused and annoyed. They could get out of this one pretty easily if they just played it smart and subtle–

“Are you sure you want to talk about that here?” Sam riposted with audible disdain. She paused for dramatic effect, giving Tucker just enough time to curse nine generations of her ancestors, one by one and with personalized venom. “We  _ know.” _

Dash was not a good actor. He glanced from side to side, hunched his shoulders a bit, and then caught himself and squared his shoulders more aggressively. “Know–know what?” he half-muttered.

Sam narrowed her eyes. Again, entirely for drama purposes, Tucker could tell. “About  _ you.” _

“I don’t—I don’t know what you’re talking about;  _ you’re _ the freaks who’ve been following me around—” He was working up a bluster, and soon there would be no stopping him.

Sam took a gamble.  _ “We know what you are,”  _ she whispered harshly.

Dash paused mid-sentence, buffering. Threateningly. Tucker could see the anger mounting in the way he widened his stance, clicked his teeth together. Oh, they were gonna die. They were gonna die and it was going to be painful, and slow, and entirely the fault of one Samantha K. Manson IV, and Tucker would spit on her grave from his own.

Abruptly, half the tension dropped out of Dash’s stance. The fortress aged a few hundred years, and the cliff eroded.  _ “Shit,”  _ he growled, mostly to himself. Then again, louder. “Shit. Alright, how did you find out, and what do you want?” He lowered his bulk into the wicker chair next to Tucker’s, ending up in a pose much more similar to Tucker’s “poised-to-flee” posture than Sam’s “deceptively relaxed supervillain.” The rounded back of the chair didn’t help; he had to arch his neck awkwardly to fit.

Tucker needed to step in, although at this point it was mostly as damage control. “I mean, we’re not going to tell anyone!” His voice squeaked a bit. “We just want to…know how it happened?”

Dash sighed heavily. Tried to get comfortable in the chair. Failed. Sighed again. “Okay. So it’s a year and a half ago.” His voice, possibly unconsciously, was lowering and softening as he spoke–maybe to prevent passers-by from hearing, or maybe just to inject into this incongruous setting a few milliliters of the ambiance of a good ghost story.

“I’m getting out of my car, in my own driveway, at about two in the morning after a party. Maybe I’m a little out of it. Anyway, I’m fumbling through my cupholders, trying to find my keys, and I hear something moving in the bushes. I’m like, okay, that sounded big, but I gotta lock the car or my dad’s gonna kill me. So I finally find my keys under the seat or something, and I lock my car, and between the car and the front door something–something  _ huge  _ jumps onto me.” Tucker noted with interest that, just with the retelling, Dash’s pupils had blown wide, deerlike and eerie.

“I’m screaming and rolling around, trying to fight this fucker off, right? And that’s when I feel it  _ bite  _ me, on the arm. And–you ever watched Shark Week? It’s the weirdest thing, but right then I remember once somebody saying a shark’s snout is weak, and if you can hit it on the snout it’ll leave you alone, so I reach out with my car keys and I stab this thing in the face. And it lets go and runs off into the woods behind my house. And that’s when my dad comes out, woken up by all the screa–the yelling, and sees me sitting in the driveway covered in blood and drives me to the hospital. Wasn’t that deep of a wound, actually, but we thought I might’ve had rabies.”

“And did you?” Sam had leaned forward, drawn in by his tone and the way he was telling it. It surprised Tucker, how good Dash was at telling this story, and that he was even bothering. Then again, this was probably the most exciting thing that had happened in his life, and maybe he’d never had the opportunity to tell anyone before.

Dash actually laughed. Short, but genuine. “No. I only found out later what I had, about three weeks later, when this lady who looks like a soccer mom–she’s even got that mom haircut, you know, the spiky hair in the back?–with, like, a gnarly bandage on her face shows up at my house and tells me ‘Hi, my name’s Marinette, I live down the street, oh and you’re a werewolf now.’”

“Holy shit,” Sam breathed. “So that’s really what you are?”

Dash frowned, the spell of the story breaking like an egg across his face. “Wait, I thought you knew.”

Tucker coughed. It was probably time to come clean, before Sam could say something worse. “Uh, sorry. So, we knew you were  _ something,  _ cuz I’m…psychic, sort of, and I sensed it? But we didn’t know exactly what? Sorry. Again.” He shot Sam the dirtiest look he could muster. This time, she at least had the self-awareness to look embarrassed.

“Are you kidding me?! You got me to expose the pack–she’s gonna kill me!” He started to get to his feet, anger mounting. A mom with two kids glanced curiously into the seating area at the noise. “If you tell  _ anyone–” _

“We won’t tell anyone, seriously! Anyway, who would believe us?!” This particular speech brought up very old memories, tasted sour on his tongue, but didn’t hurt as much as Tucker might’ve expected.

Dash looked slightly mollified. He glared, clenching his fingers on the seat of his chair. “There’s–there’s people. I haven’t told my parents. Marinette said if it got out…it could be really bad.”

“And you haven’t told your friends?” Sam ventured, skeptical. “I thought you and Kwan were, like, joined at the biceps. Or, sorry, I can do better–joined at the lack of neck.”

“Yeah, you’re fucking hilarious, Manson.” Slowly, Dash settled back into the chair. “Paulina knows something’s up; I haven’t told her exactly what. But Kwan and Star’s dads are both part of like, a  _ hunting _ club. They go out and shoot stuff together on the weekends. From what I’ve heard, it is  _ not  _ a good idea to be messing with that.”

Tucker’s brain stalled for a minute. For the first time in that conversation, he was able to completely forget the cold, unpleasant way his skin was prickling, and the faint smell of blood. Because, well: “Wait, wait, wait.” There was a manic energy building in his chest; he trapped it beneath his epiglottis. “Are you telling me–” He had to pause. Dash was giving him a weird look. “Are you telling me. There are  _ werewolf hunters.” _

“Nobody will really give me a yes or no answer–” The rest of Dash’s answer was drowned out under Tucker’s peals of laughter. Sam started giggling too, a little hesitantly, although it seemed like she didn’t really get it. She was something of a sympathetic laugher. Several mall patrons looked through the leaves as they walked past, and smiled at the deceptive picture they made–three teenagers, having fun at the mall. Dash just looked irritated. “What?”

“Sorry, it’s just–” Tucker struggled for breath.  _ “Werewolf hunters.  _ It’s just–it’s just too ridiculous.”

“More ridiculous than ghost portals?” Sam countered skeptically. “More ridiculous than summoning somebody with ‘dead man’s blood’?”

_ “Yes! _ I’m sorry, there’s just” – _ wheeze _ – “no way I’ll ever be able to take  _ werewolf hunters  _ seriously!”

Dash growled–not really, but, like, close–and a distant part of Tucker’s mind registered that okay, his teeth were just a little too long. “You’re laughing about people whose _literal job_ is hunting me down to kill me.”

“Oh, look, I’ve offended the werewolf.” This was too much. Tucker exploded in another round of uncontrollable, air-gulping laughter, Sam joining in with a little less force.

“Fuck you, Foley. I’m leaving. Don’t follow me.” He stood up and loomed again, switching his weight between the balls of his feet, reminding Tucker of the combination of sixth sense and instinct twitching down his spine. Dash had scrunched up his nose in incensed disgust, baring his teeth in the process. The smell of blood got stronger. “If you try to blackmail me with this,  _ we will kill you. _ And that’s not a fucking joke. You hear me?”

The manic energy was still there, emboldening Tucker, dampening his common sense, so he didn’t make any assurances. Somehow, the discovery that his childhood tormentor was a werewolf had made him far less scared of him. “Hey, I’m psychic, remember? You come for me and I’ll r–uh–rip you apart with my mind.”

Dash faltered, glancing at Sam. “Can he really–?” He cut himself off, but not before Sam could figure out the full question and give him a wide, gleaming, truly  _ wicked  _ grin.

“Oh, 100%. I’ve seen him do it. Takes him 20 seconds, tops.”

“...Fuckin’ freaks.” Dash had apparently figured out that he wasn’t going to win this one. He stormed out of the seating area with far less dignity than one might expect from an apex predator of the night.

Tucker and Sam looked at each other and burst out laughing again. It wasn’t actually funny; it was just that it was  _ really  _ funny.

“Okay, so I’m thinking it probably isn’t him,” Sam gasped out once she’d almost recovered.

“Yeah, he–he has an alibi for where he goes at night, at least once a month,” Tucker agreed. “And anyway, I doubt he would be out here ritual-sacrificing people with a kitchen knife when he can literally turn into a kickass wolf.”

“Oh my god,  _ Teen Wolf  _ was right about so many things,” Sam said in a tone of awed reflection. “I hate it.”

Tucker paused, reminded of how they’d gotten here. He didn’t like to get into it with Sam–he generally followed a policy of pacification, containment, and silent disapproval in their friendship–but this needed to be said. He sobered at the thought, and in preparation. “Hey, I know it worked, but seriously,  _ warn me  _ when you’re going to do something like  _ threatening a supernatural creature and potential serial killer,  _ okay? That’s twice now, dude, and it’s actually not smart. Like, you realize, right? We’re laughing now, but this stuff is  _ dangerous. _ We could get really hurt.” He paused again, considering, debating if he wanted to pull this card, deciding it was worth it. __ “I’ve  _ seen _ it.” And it was terrifying.

Sam had opened her mouth like she was about to retaliate, but she subsided at the reminder. Wow, Tucker had actually gotten through that thick skull. Incredible. She was sitting up from the back of the lawn chair, and the plastic leaves behind her head crowned her with a spiky green halo as she spoke, haltingly.

“Okay. That’s fair. I really do understand, Tuck; I know I joke about it, but this isn’t a game to me. I’m  _ angry  _ at whoever would do that to people. I want justice for them–maybe not Schulker, but the other ones. And we aren’t going to accomplish anything without taking risks.” She visibly caught herself as her tone edged toward belligerent at the end, and she wrung Debate Team Sam out of her voice before continuing. “But yeah. I’ll be more careful, and I’ll give you a heads-up if there’s a risk I really think is worth it.”

Privately, Tucker doubted she actually understood the danger. How could she? She hadn’t seen blood splattered on a stall door, dripping off the hinges, and known she had about a 50% chance of continuing to live on a lazy afternoon in a library bathroom. Sunny-lawn suburbanite kids weren’t programmed to understand mortality. Tucker doubted  _ he _ fully grasped it, either, and hoped he never would.

But in the history of their relationship, this was an almost unprecedented victory. Tucker would take it.

~(*0*)~

Speaking of fraught relationships, Sam dropped Tucker off at home around 10 to find his mother standing in the entrance hallway, still in her impeccable tan suit from work, arms crossed. His seventh sense–specifically, his teenager sense–warned him that this was not a good sign.

“Where were you, Tucker? I texted you 45 minutes ago, and you didn’t respond.”

“Oh, crap, right!” He’d seen the notification when the text came in, and intended to respond, but then their waiter had come with the check for dinner and he and Sam had had to figure out who was paying card or cash and they’d forgotten to ask the waiter to split the check in the first place. He pulled out his phone, and sure enough the text was still there, unopened, along with two more he hadn’t even noticed. His phone was still silenced from their brief and unsuccessful stint of stalking Dash. “I’m sorry, Mom, I was out to dinner with Sam at Old Tom’s Transdimensional Thai and I just totally forgot to reply.”

“That’s not good enough, Tucker!” He’d been half watching her and half scrolling through other texts as he talked–oof, there was a missed call from her, that wasn’t good–but now his head swung up, fully alert. He was surprised at the emphasis in her voice. Looking more closely, he realized she was  _ really  _ irritated. Maybe even angry. Was she…shaking a little bit? She was standing, tense, with one hand on the dark knick-knacks table that stood against the right-hand wall of the short hallway before it opened into the kitchen and living room. It was a high-ceilinged space, and it opened quickly, but in this situation it still felt claustrophobic.

“I’m really sorry!” he said hurriedly. “It was bad, I know, and I’ll answer everything quickly in the future, but I told you I would be out with Sam all afternoon; what’s the big deal?”

That was definitely the wrong phrasing, and he cringed as soon as he said it.

“The  _ big deal  _ is that there is a  _ serial killer  _ in our city, Tucker, and your  _ cousin  _ got  _ stabbed  _ in the  _ middle of the day!  _ So when I text, you answer, and when I call, you  _ definitely answer!!” _

Was she going to cry?  _ Please, don’t let her cry.  _ Tucker shifted uncomfortably, readjusting his grip on his backpack with one hand, the other still on the door handle. Behind him was the open door, a rectangle of night, dark in a way he hadn’t really been aware of until lately. He closed it.

“Thank god I didn’t call your father. Thank god it was just me who had to sit here for 45 minutes wondering if my son was–” She broke off. Shoot. Tucker had really messed up.

“I’m really, really sorry, Mom.” And he realized that he was. His satisfaction from the day was dissolving in his mouth. “I’m okay, and I promise I’ll answer everything as soon as I see it from now on, and keep my phone off silent. And I’ll make sure you know where I’m going, and I’ll make sure I’m always with someone. I  _ have  _ been making sure I’m always with someone.” Tucker deliberated for a second, then locked the door and walked forward to give his mom a hug.

She returned it, and now he could tell that she was shaking, but only slightly, and he would guess more from anger than fear. She hadn’t cried. He’d scared her, but not enough that she would cry. Still, the shame dripped hot and acidic into his stomach, and he hugged her tighter.

“I won’t do it again,” he mumbled into the cool fabric on her shoulder.

“You’re damn right you won’t. And you’re coming home by eight until this person is caught.”

He pulled back, stumbling a little as his backpack overbalanced him.  _ “Eight?  _ Mom, I mean, nine–”

“No, I am not having this argument with you! Sunset is at seven; eight is more than generous!”

“But–” He cut himself off; the shame sloshing in his stomach and, admittedly, the impulse toward self-preservation both whispered to him that this was not the time to push. “You’re right. I promise. Home by eight. …But do you have to tell Dad?” He wasn’t exactly eager to get yelled at twice.

She sighed, dropping her left hand back onto the table and slumping a bit, letting it take more of her weight. “If it’s settled, then I guess we don’t need to discuss it further. But I trust you to honor that promise.” She said “trust” like she meant “expect;” Tucker supposed it was more of a mixture of the two.

“I will. Can I go to bed now?” He worried once he’d said it that it had come out as snippy, rather than as the genuine question he’d intended, but luckily she either understood or was willing to overlook it.

“Yes. I’m glad you’re safe.” She stepped back and toward the kitchen, shaking off the distress of the evening with audible effort. “There’s leftover penne in the fridge if you want to pack a lunch tomorrow.”

Tucker started toward the living room. “Thanks, Mom. Does it have that tomato sauce? With the nuts?”

“Yep.”

“Ooh, yes, then I am definitely stealing those before Dad can get to them.”

“It’s not exactly a heist if you have carte blanche from the lady of the house.”

She was rallying! Yet another success in a long and storied career! He pushed his advantage. “I would actually describe it as more of a smash-and-grab? Less elegance, more pasta-fueled rage and desperation.”

From out of sight, Angela Foley’s voice floated to him, disembodied and not the least bit eerie. “You’d better not be doing any smashing in my kitchen, Tucker Charles. Most of my glassware is older than you, and it’s certainly done more for this family over the years.”

“I am hurt, Mother! Wounded!” Tucker called over his shoulder as he padded up the stairs. For some reason, it was a lot easier to discount even the threat of spectral intruders when he could hear his mom making tea in the microwave a few yards away.

The argument stayed with him, though. He supposed, now that he thought about it, that eight really was a generous curfew given the circumstances. Inconvenient, if he, Sam, and Danny had to stalk anyone else, but reasonable, especially given how shaken up she’d been.

It brought back what he’d been thinking, earlier, about suburban kids and the possibility of disaster. About how even after seeing blood on a stall door, he still couldn’t quite grasp the concept.

Maybe one day, when he had kids–that’s when he’d get it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in which we introduce j. klein the janitor's love interest, marinette, a soccer mom who just happens to be a werewolf.  
> she's not an oc or anything, i just felt like it made more sense with a name and loa marinette is sometimes considered the patron of werewolves, although now it seems kinda stilted  
> also take that, disney! main characters CAN have alive and attentive parents! BAMBIS MOM DIDNT DESERVE THIS


	12. Nails in the Coffin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These kids need all the allies they can get, even if they may upset Sam's ex-goth sensibilities.

Nails in the Coffin

_or alternatively:_ Tucker Gets a Girl’s Number, and Other Groundbreaking Developments

Danny showed up at lunch on Friday the 27th with a huge strip of gauze wrapped several times around his hand, purpling a little on the palm. “What happened?” Sam asked, tone shaded with concern.

Danny looked confused, then glanced down and was reminded of the injury. “Oh,” he answered, smiling a little. “I cut my hand on a broken beaker in Chem and bled all over my lab partner. I hope he was able to find a change of clothes.”

Tucker leaned in close, causing Danny to give him a weird look and back away slightly. He glanced around, then intoned, “Is that code for fighting a, you know” –he leaned in closer– “G-H-O-S-T?”

“What? No, it means that’s actually what happened. I’m a total klutz.”

“Oh.”

“So, the crusade to figure out Dash’s darkest secrets,” Danny offered with the air of a person eagerly changing a subject. “Any results? Or do I have to beat him up later?”

“Yeah, actually.” Sam lowered her voice to a safe level for the mostly empty area of the bleachers they were sitting on. She and Tucker had let Danny in on their preferred lunch spot a week or so ago. “Turns out he’s a werewolf.”

Danny choked on his watery cafeteria milk. “I’m sorry, _actually?_ You’re joking. _Are_ you joking?”

Tucker felt gratified by this reaction, since it somewhat vindicated his own. Sam nodded soberly. “Not joking. And it gives him a decent reason for mysteriously ducking commitments on nights with a full moon.”

The coughs had continued through this speech and showed no signs of abating. Tucker was beginning to wonder how effective the Heimlich would be on a ghost when Danny abruptly did something that set Tucker’s teeth on edge, and the milk dropped _through_ his throat. Sam looked queasy. Danny ignored it, thoroughly invested in voicing his disbelieving outrage: “You found out that _werewolves are real_ and you didn’t think that merited a text?!”

Tucker and Sam made eye contact, equally uncomfortable. Tucker murmured, “Oh, sorry, we just assumed you knew.”

Danny looked almost homicidally exasperated at this point (another person probably would’ve looked angry, but every expression in Danny’s emotional repertoire was at least a little bit tainted with “tired”). They would never find out what he was about to say, however, because they were interrupted by the tinny _taptaptaptap_ of gel nails on metal _way_ too close by. Tucker jumped and whirled to look for the source, somewhere immediately behind and below him.

Paulina stood on the grass at the bottom of the bleachers, uncharacteristically dressed down in Lulu leggings and a green crop top but appearing characteristically bored. The long cotton-candy colored nails she had just _tap-tap-tapped_ on the bleacher railing disappeared as she folded her arms. “Hey.”

Tucker and Sam stared.

Danny, likely because he was the one least familiar with Her Majesty Paulina Sanchez, reacted first. “Uh, hey. What’s up?”

She paused before answering, as if to gather her thoughts or maybe overcome her disgust at associating with them. Paulina hadn’t really been _popular,_ per se, since freshman year; she had come into high school with that rare, magnetic breed of confidence seldom seen in fourteen-year-olds, but people had quickly recognized her standoffishness and relish for conflict as red flags. She had a decent number of friends, but nobody else really wanted to _be_ her friend. And she had always seemed fine with that, which was why it was weird to see her here, alone.

She made eye contact with Tucker, expression intense and strange. “Dash told me about what happened at the mall, and what you were looking into. I might be able to tell you a few things.”

Sam slowly put her salad down. “Like what?”

“Not here. You know the pool shed?”

The pool was a five-minute walk from the football field, around the back of the humanities building. They marched in silence (confused silence, on Danny’s part), following a rigid-backed Paulina, who still carried her shiny silver backpack over one shoulder. It was another clouded-over day, and windy enough that the trash from Tucker’s lunch fluttered and had to be held down with a thumb on the edge of the tray or weighed down by his lasagna plate. A moment of inattention as they walked cost him his almost-empty chip bag; it floated gracefully over one fence only to be caught by another and hang there, squirming. Everything was washed out and halfway to gray, like an old black-and-white movie halfheartedly colorized by a bored intern.

Danny edged up next to Sam. “What’s in the pool shed?” he whispered.

“No idea.” They were close enough to hear wind-thrown ripples lapping against the side of the pool.

The pool shed was one of those small plastic buildings commonly seen around schools that don’t want to spend money on construction, about a foot taller than Tucker and maybe 10 feet square. Everyone was forced to duck as they entered. Coiled like slinkies on two walls were the green-and-white lane lines that floated in the pool during swim practice, and another wall was taken up by a metal shelving unit similar to the one in the janitor’s closet, with chlorine and other chemicals as well as general cleaning stuff. A pool skimmer leaned in one corner, slowly dripping sharp-smelling water onto the grimy grey plastic floor. Paulina hesitated for a moment, then settled onto the cleanest part of the floor she could find, opposite the shelves. Her followers, slowly and with varying degrees of wariness, did the same, and Sam pulled the door closed, leaving them mostly in the dark.

Paulina unzipped her backpack, and something about the loud chainsaw buzz of it made the hair on Tucker’s arms raise.

“You guys are looking into the supernatural,” she began, totally nonchalant. “I know you confronted Dash after hearing that he’s gone missing a few nights, and I know the killer attacked Tucker’s cousin or something not that long ago, and I know that _something’s_ wrong with the new kid.” She indicated Danny with a tilt of her head. “So what I think is that you realize something is up with this serial killer case, and you’re trying to solve it.”

They sat there in stunned silence for a second, and then Tucker figured he should respond for the group. “Wow. Yep, that’s…that’s about it.” He shifted and resettled nervously. “So, uh…how do _you_ know about the supernatural?”

“My aunt taught me a little brujería, when I was younger.” When everyone but Sam showed no signs of recognition, she looked irritated but obligingly elaborated. “The way she used it, it was a broad term for a lot of Latin American and Afrolatino variants of witchcraft, including some religions. My grandma taught me not just the charms and spells you can’t really see proof of, but also some of the more noticeable and…less socially acceptable techniques. That’s how I learned that supernaturally influencing the world is possible.

“So” –and her tone of voice said _naturally–_ “I started looking into other types of occultism. By now I’d say I’m probably a decently accomplished novice practitioner of a few things. The one I really became good at immediately, though, is tarot.”

To punctuate this thought, she tossed down a deck of cards with one hand, then flipped her hair over one shoulder with the other. “I guess I’m just talented like that,” she added in an airy tone, positively _radiating_ smugness.

The deck of cards sat on the floor in the middle of their circle, tilted slightly upward–the plastic floor had puckered and deformed over time as the sun and water did their work. Sam eyed the cards the same way one eyes an undetonated land mine. “Okay,” she hazarded. “What does that have to do with us, or the murders?”

Instead of answering directly, Paulina folded her legs to the side, leaned forward, and dealt, facing Tucker since he sat directly across from her. She went with a simple three-card spread, ostensibly Past, Present, and Future. With little fanfare, she flipped them all over. The three of pentacles, the king of swords reversed, and Death.

Tucker’s spine twitched. Sam looked ill. Danny looked like he might have been nodding off a bit.

“For the past few weeks, all I’ve been getting for the future is Death. Even if I remove the Death card from the deck, I’ll turn it over and it’ll be Death,” Paulina explained. She indicated the irritant card with a pink-nailed flourish. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. And _lately_ it’s gotten to the point where it’s not just happening when I’m doing divination or other types of cartomancy.” She scowled. “I can’t even play solitaire anymore. It’s like, honestly, I get the picture!”

Paulina always used English idioms like she was still slightly unfamiliar with them, deliberately rushing through “I get the picture” and “that’s the last straw” like a middle schooler swearing for the first time. It was one of the few things about her that Tucker found disarming—it was her one admission of insecurity, but it also demonstrated her tenacious refusal to let insecurity overcome her. Paulina never apologized. Tucker had always been a little impressed by that, and a little scared.

Now, Paulina regathered the three-card spread into her hand, frowning. Hesitantly, Sam reached over and selected another three cards, dealing them out the way Paulina had. She flipped them one by one. Sure enough, the third was death. Tucker’s teeth ground together again, and a sickness pooled in his chest. Paulina fanned out the previous spread, revealing that she now held the Fool as her third card.

“I think it has to do with this murder. Certain paranormal...elements…have been extremely unhappy since the murders came to Amity.” Paulina paused for a millisecond of indecision, then continued a little softer than Tucker was used to from her. “Also, I was—good friends with Amber McClain. The, the fifth victim. She was my assistant coach in club soccer, and she got me and my friends into parties, and—well.” She’d turned her head slightly to the side, gaze tangling somewhere in the lane line coils, but at this she abruptly refocused on her audience.

“I mention it because Amber was teaching me about Vodun before she died.” The fierceness was back in the set of her jaw. “Eh, voodoo. Amber dabbled. I’ve been trying to build a group of people who share my interests for a while—”

“Wait, is that why you were so nice to me in middle school?” Sam interrupted. “I thought it was because I’m rich, but you were trying to build a coven?!”

Paulina fixed her with a bored look. “Yes, and from that you can understand how truly desperate I was, lacking even mediocre candidates. Now, can I get to the _point?”_ She didn’t wait for an answer, which was good, as it likely would have been extremely insulting.

“Amber didn’t deserve to have that happen to her.” Tucker straightened a little, surprised. She was speaking quicker, and louder, abandoning any remaining vestiges of defensive boredom. “I want to help you find the _cabrón_ who did it and _make him pay_ with my own fucking hands. If he’s something supernatural, we may be the only ones who can stop him, and also I do not want to deal with whatever terrible thing is going to happen when I can make you all deal with it for me. So. In conclusion. What do you know, and do you have _any_ idea what’s coming?”

Finished, the declaration of war drifted down to the center of the circle, settling next to the innocent tarot deck. Paulina sat back and crossed her arms. Waiting.

Tucker exchanged a glance with Sam. Even Danny seemed to wake up a bit. Tucker could see his own question reflected in the narrowing of Sam’s eyes and the way her lips thinned: Paulina Sanchez was not a good person.

But was she trustworthy?

Tucker chewed on the inside of his cheek. Sam squinted one eye in distaste. Tucker smiled wryly–

“Well, mostly we’ve just been summoning victims, so they can tell us things. We know Schulker was a wechuge...all the victims were found on occult holidays, more or less...uh, it may have something to do with people committing crimes. That’s what we know so far, I think. Did I miss anything?” Danny turned to Sam and Tucker, the picture of innocence.

Sam _seethed,_ and Tucker frowned. The already tense mood in the pool shed soured. _Well, those secrets are out now,_ Tucker reflected ruefully. _No taking them back._ Paulina was already eyeing them like they’d just told her chocolate was good for you.

“Summoning?” Paulina arched an eyebrow. “That’s pretty high-level witchcraft. Since when can _Manson_ summon things?”

“You talk like you’re some big successful witch but you can’t draw a circle and light some candles?” Sam laughed, angrily, and Danny looked at her, unnerved. The bitterness in seeping out between her next words was so palpable even Tucker cringed. “Turns out nobody stays dead in this town. Not if you know where to look.”

Something dripped from the ceiling onto Tucker’s leg. In the awkward moment that followed, Paulina sniffed and shook her head, throwing the full force of her dismissive dignity into her endeavor to ignore Sam entirely. “Okay, so what is this ‘wechuge’? I have never heard of it.”

Sam was fuming and Danny probably hadn’t done his research, so Tucker recognized with discomfort that it fell to him to be diplomatic. Again. “Uh. Wechuge–or wechuges? I don’t know the plural–share a lot of characteristics with wendigos, but they’re more associated with, like, winter and ice. They’re an Athabaskan thing, whereas wendigos are Algonquian. You know what a wendigo is, right?”

“Yes, basically.” Paulina nodded.

“Uh…yeah.” Tucker paused; something had just poked into his memory, like a pebble in his boot if his boot were his skull. “It’s weird, though,” he started slowly. “Schulker said he made a deal, like, stated his own terms to become a wechuge. But from what I’ve found on the internet, it’s not something you _choose._ Some sources say it’s a sort of possession thing by animal spirits, and religion-related, but it always seems to be unwilling.”

“Huh.” Paulina frowned. “I was going to say it sounds like some of the practices of Vodun, but the goal there generally _is_ successfully being possessed.”

“And Amber taught you about Vodun, right?” Sam growled from her corner. Good old Sam–Tucker could hear that she was struggling to suppress her annoyance, but she had her priorities straight. Sam leaned forward over her crossed legs and further into the circle, planting one fisted hand on the ground to support her and tapping impatiently on the side of her knee with the other. “Let’s back up to that. That’s three victims or attempted victims out of seven who we know were involved in the occult or paranormal before their deaths: Schulker, Amber, and Tristan. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that motorcyclist–the second victim–had some sort of supernatural help to pull off those stunts.”

Paulina put a crooked pointer finger to her lower lip and absentmindedly pressed on it, apparently a tic that showed up when she concentrated. (If it were anyone else, Tucker would assume she didn’t know it was kinda hot.) “My dad once complained that Kwan’s mom’s enemies on the PTA always seemed to have bad luck. Like, I think Mrs. Winters got caught in her affair in the middle of the graduation debacle.” She moved her finger to her chin, eyes narrowed. _“And_ right when Daddy was siding with Ms. Lee against Mrs. Ainara on the expulsion procedure issue, the Lees were arrested for tax fraud.”

They shared a wide-eyed moment in the dark.

Sam breathed out purposefully, anger fully pushed aside now that she had the puzzle pieces in her hands. “Okay. So I think it’s safe to assume that they were all involved in some type of occultism. But you know what bothers me with this pattern? Why the hell would the killer come to Amity? Just based on population, wouldn’t it make sense for there to be a lot more potential targets in Chicago?”

Tucker was sitting in a damp spot on the floor, and it was starting to soak through his jeans. He shifted to put his weight on his right hip and arm, leaving as little of himself on the ground as possible. “My cousin did say Casper High has a weird amount of supernatural stuff,” he ventured. “Maybe that extends to all of Amity?”

“But Chicago has a lot of ghosts. The boundary is thinner there. That usually leads to weird things developing.” Immediately, Danny looked like he regretted contributing to the conversation, because now Paulina was devoting her full attention to him, along with an unhealthy amount of curiosity. Tucker noted that Danny hadn’t shared any information about _his_ whole deal when he was spilling the results of their investigation. And what exactly was the _boundary,_ beyond what the context implied?

Sam was still reasoning through this latest snag in the puzzle-solving process, staring off into the middle distance. “Maybe he’s not just looking for occultists or whatever,” she muttered, sounding it out as she went. “Maybe it’s more specific. But Vodun and Athabaskan folklore don’t have a lot in common– _wait.”_

Tucker could see the moment of lightning inspiration. Sam’s eyes positively _burned,_ she looked so excited. Her stray hairs caught the thin grey light from the crack between ceiling and wall, and she _sparkled._

The group waited, holding its collective breath. The pause stretched further.

And further.

Paulina lost patience first, despite being the member of this quartet with the greatest appreciation for drama. _“What,_ Manson?”

She grinned widely. “It’s contract magic!”

…

Everyone kind of looked at her blankly. Tucker thought he would have to prompt her to explain, but after a few seconds, once she saw that no one appreciated her brilliance off the bat, she deigned to elaborate. “Okay, so! Paulina was saying that practicing voodoo–Vodun–is like the wechuge because it involves possession, right? There’s another, stronger, extranormal party involved. And Schulker said he’d made a deal, while in voodoo I think you do have to offer something in exchange if you want to, like, commune with a–loa, I think?–or ask a favor! And Tucker, when you’ve talked about your psychic thing, you make it sound like there’s some big outside force that’s giving you information in exchange for your performing certain duties and responsibilities. Like a contract!”

Tucker grumbled. “Can I break it, then? I don’t remember signing anything.”

“Shut up, I’m being a genius. Johnny–the 13 motorcycle guy–could easily have, like, a demon contract or something! I think the victims are being targeted because they practice _this kind_ of magic–having outstanding deals or exchanges with a supernatural being. Because wouldn’t there be power? In breaking those contracts, or assuming them?”

Something twanged, a slender finger plucking one of Tucker’s neural connections like a guitar string.

Tucker’s hindbrain liked this theory. Which was, on so many levels, disturbing.

Distantly, the grating _brinnggg_ of a bell careened between buildings and back down the wires of the PA system, signalling the end of lunch and the beginning of 7th period extracurriculars.

“Shit, I have cheer.” Paulina dug into her backpack and pulled out a flowery notepad with a pen in an elastic loop on the inside cover. Shifting her weight over her legs until she was kneeling, she scratched something onto a clean page, then tore it out ruthlessly so it ended up a trapezoid with one messy edge. There were more pastel flowers printed onto in the upper right-hand corner, and when she shoved it at Tucker he saw that she’d written ten digits. “Here’s my number. Text me if you think of anything, and I will help you make this bastard pay.”

Then she gathered up her cards, rocked back on her heels to stand, and stalked out into the open air with a hiss of _“This never happened.”_

The sudden opening of the door let in a cascade of light, stronger and whiter than the cloud-cover grey of before, and Tucker blinked as his eyes adjusted. In the wake of the tornado that was Her Majesty Paulina Sanchez, the three of them sat for a moment, processing, and then began struggling to their feet.

“Well,” Danny drawled, grinning at Tucker. “That’s one way to get a girl’s number.”

Tucker shoved him into the cleaning supplies.

Sam, who now stood just outside the door, was not amused. Honestly, Tucker had hoped they could avoid this whole argument as Sam basked in the lingering warm self-satisfaction from developing her theory, but she wasn’t one to let things go easily.

“Are you _stupid,_ Fenton?! The killer is probably someone connected to the school, and Paulina is connected to the school _and_ the supernatural! You can’t just tell her everything immediately!” she ranted, gesticulating wildly.

Danny halted in the doorway, looking surprised. Sam kept walking, so Danny was forced to jog a few steps to catch up as he responded. “Oh. Sorry, it’s just—I mean, she’s in our class! I’ve fought some pretty tough kids who, like, died tragic and traumatic deaths, but in my experience normal spoiled high schoolers just...don’t really pose a legitimate threat.”

“Have you _heard_ of a school shooter?!”

Fair point. “I mean, yeah, but, the stuff I fight….” Danny trailed off. Considered Sam’s profile for a long moment, and something contorted in his face.

“...I can see your point, though. Okay. Sorry, I just–I think my sense of scale for danger has gotten a little screwy. With, you know, dying and all.” He frowned, and nodded. “Yeah. I won’t do that again.”

That seemed to have taken the wind out of Sam’s sails; she turned to look at him for the first time, posture opening. Tucker was surprised, too—he himself was a pretty easygoing guy, but he almost never backed down like that, especially with Sam. They didn’t tend to get into actual _fights,_ but they could argue for days about minutiae, continuing long after either of them actually cared about the topic at hand. And Danny didn’t seem all that mature.

Huh. Well, Tucker wasn’t complaining. He could see it in Sam’s tense back and fidgeting fingers as she mulled it over, and he could see, as they turned the corner and followed the humanities building’s north wall back toward the main courtyard, when she reluctantly let it go.

Which was good, because the usually comfortingly populated main area of the school wasn’t comforting in the least–figures dotted edges and doorways, but he couldn’t make out a single face.

Dense winds tugged at his ankles, chuckling softly, and the sky was still so dark. His gorge rose, remembering the sick way his bones had clacked and rubbed past each other when Paulina had turned over that last card. The bulbous yellow skull in black armor, mounted, peeked around bricked corners and leaned against shadows, horse pawing restlessly at the ground. Stumbling, erratic, huge eyes rolling...waiting the gentle heel-touch to the ribs that would signal the charge…

_Haha, I hate it!_ Tucker checked over his shoulder once more, and then jogged up to level with the other two. “So! Now that you’re not going to kill each other, how about a movie night?” he yelped. His voice sounded too bright to his own ears. “You can sleep over after, and we even have” –though he shuddered at the thought– “vegan popcorn!”

Tucker hoped his grin didn’t twitch.

~(*0*)~

Against all odds, since all odds seemed to indicate that the world was ending or something equally terrible and ridiculous, the movie night was pretty fun.

Sam offered her house, since she had the better gaming system, TV, and general floorspace, but Tucker was mindful of his new curfew. He’d promised to be home by eight, and he wasn’t exactly thrilled at the idea of leaving Sam’s an hour and a half after sunset to return to a dark, empty apartment, so he insisted his place was the best option. They met up on the school’s front steps and made it there around 3:30, leaving a comfortable three-hour cushion between them and the encroaching night.

“Are we ordering a pizza? Sam yelled from the upstairs closet, where she’d gone to grab spare pillows and blankets.

“Yeah,” Tucker shouted back. “Spinach flatbread?”

“Obviously!”

Tucker turned to Danny, who’d just gotten off the phone with his parents. “What do you want? Like, pepperoni, or something else?”

“Uh. Can I get sausage? I’ll pay you pack.” Danny had a hip hitched over the arm of the sofa as he surveyed the living room. “Did you lock the door?”

“Yep.” Tucker popped the “p.” “But let’s not talk about that! Do you know a movie we should watch?”

“Huh? ...Nah, I’m good with whatever. Are we not gonna, like, strategize or something?”

“Nahhh. We are going to sit back, relax, and not think _at all_ about our impending doom. Sausage it is!” Tucker started typing the name of the closest pizza place into his phone (it was a mom and pop business called Cheese Please, though he hit _enter_ before completing the phrase so what he actually searched was cheese “pleas”) and waved absently toward the kitchen. “We have, like, cereal in the pantry in the meantime.”

“Oh. Thanks, but I’ll pass.” Danny laughed lightly. “Wow, it’s kind of funny–I’ve seen your room but literally none of the rest of your house. And your room is _upstairs.”_

Right, Danny had been summoned _directly into Tucker’s room,_ and then left via un-summoning rather than the front door _._ Tucker snorted, surprised at the warm amusement that curled in his chest. “...Why are our lives like this?”

“Ignorance is bliss, dude.” Danny dropped backward onto the couch, leaving his legs hanging over sofa’s squashy blue arm and smiling wryly. “Ignorance is bliss.”

The three ended up huddled on Tucker’s couch, digging socked feet into the carpet and watching the most lighthearted, least threatening thing they could find. They settled on _Parks and Rec._ Danny claimed it didn’t really fit his sense of humor, but that didn’t matter much because he conked out at six and only woke up two hours later, roused by the smell of Sam’s vegan aberration parading as popcorn butter.

Tucker realized at some point that evening—probably when Danny woke up to find Sam had drawn a pretty realistic goatee on his face while he slept, and looked to Tucker for permission to use one of his couch pillows to beat her up for it—that Danny had stopped being “that weird guy from school who’s, like, arguably dead” and become _“our_ weird guy from school who’s, like, arguably dead.” It was a nice realization. Tucker fell asleep smiling, listening to Sam’s whistling breaths from the other end of the couch and Danny shifting in a pile of blankets on the floor. (He didn’t breathe audibly? Which should have been much more disturbing than it was.)

He didn’t dream at all that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahahaha im sorry i promise this is the last chapter where characters sit in a small secluded space and talk about stuff!! it's irritating because i want them to be active protagonists who figure stuff out rather than having it revealed to them, but that's...not a super exciting process, realistically.
> 
> but its okay because next chapter...things get real.
> 
> GET READY FOR NARRATIVE PHASE TWO, BABEYYYYY!!! :) :) :)


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